However, given the causal constraint on reference, you could never refer to the real brain in a vat that you are (and always have been), and so realism entails a necessary falsehood, refuting itself. — Michael

I wander about this - it's been a while since I've read Putnam so I might try to read an SEP article on it later. Why would realism entail that I always have access to / be able to refer to / mind independent reality?
None of this shows why realism is false, just that a certain way realist talk is false.

By that sentence do you mean that we accept semantic externalism?
I don't think the argument can rule out a skeptical hypothesis, just rule out specifying the exact conditions of some skeptical hypothesis.
For instance, I could still say 'it's possible that when I was 12 a mad scientist placed my brain into a vat and I have been living in a vat ever since'. This formulation would allow me to refer to brains in vats.

Also a curiosity of the argument is that if we as a forum got together and decided to envat someone who had just been born. They would be a brain in a vat, but they would never be able to entertain the notion that they were a brain in a vat.

. I don't get what that denial achieves
It doesn't prove that someone isn't a brain in a vat.

I've seen a whole bunch of attempts to prove that we are not brains in vats. Putnam attempts to prove that we can never say that we are brains in vats and have that be true. This is because there isn't a causal connection between the vat in the 'real' world and us in the virtual envatted world. Without this causal connection we cannot refer to vats, to the sentence 'I am a brain in a vat can' not be true.

I don't believe there is a way out of the skeptical hypothesis. Once we take the view that we are somehow experiencing the mental, there is no way for us to use thought (further mental) to think our way to the 'real' world.

I had a re-read of the post, the tone can be taken as more or less aggressive - it looks like I took it as more aggressive than you meant it. Plenty of us probably don't feel that this is Jamalrob's site, or the mod's site. There was a community that moved here. They probably like me see the mods as other posters who volunteer to keep the place running, not some governing body or authority. I get that part of being a mod is needing to be an authority at certain times.

I do agree with what you wrote, that a site shouldn't be democratic. If you didn't mean it in the way of 'my way or the highway', then yeh there's nothing wrong with the comment. If people don't like the culture of the site, which includes moderating decisions they can leave.

Yah I was actually hesitant about keeping the money because of that. I did spend an hour helping for an experiment, only to give them bogus data for a $5 gain. I actually thought of the Milgram experiment while deciding and recalled that one hypothesis was that people continued not because of the authority of the scientist but because they valued science. So the words 'the experiment requires you to continue' had significance.

Yeh I don't trust them at all. The last study I participated in, they put on head gear to measure some kind of brain activity and had me performing some easy vs hard tasks on a computer.
It turned out that the task results were completely irrelevant, rather there were some beeps in the background and they were testing whether the brain reacts to the beeps in the same way when it's loaded with hard tasks as opposed to easy tasks.

Well it's not right now.
Yesterday I participated in a psychological study that one of my friends was running. They were investigating altruism vs selfishness. Part of the study was the dictator game.

Your in a room with only the person running the experiment. They tell you that the other people participating will all pick a card out of this bag. There are 2 roles, the dictator and recipient. The dictator is given $10 and can choose to split it with the recipient in any way they want. I pulled the dictator card out of the bag, so my friend gave me $10 in coins as well as an envelope and a wooden box. They left the room and I am meant to place any amount I want into the envelope then put it through a slit in the wooden box.

I separate the coins into $5 each and was about to put the money into the box when I realized that the game was probably a sham. The recipients don't actually get tested on anything and that the people running the study wouldn't waste half their participants without getting data, the bag was probably filled with only dictator cards. So I kept all the money.

My friend probably thinks I'm a prick now, but eh.

I probably wont be able to participate much as I have my honors thesis due in 2 months but I'll keep track of what's going on.

If people decide on Derrida and anyone has trouble finding a copy, the in-print translation of the text is titled 'Voice and Phenomenon' rather than 'Speech and Phenomena'.

A bookshelf for my car.

"That is the least practical thing I've ever seen" - one of my mates.

Eh, I see that comment as unnecessary. There's no need to set that tone or create a clear divide between posters and mods.

At the same time it's more useful to look at what the mods are actually doing than listen to what they say they are doing. Do you actually have an issue with the moderation, or just with something that Un said? I don't feel that there is a large gap between my interests and the mods interests.

There's a bit of a better vibe than the old place, there isn't the same feeling that everyone's head is just a couple bad posts from being on the chopping block. Maybe that's just an illusion since it's mostly the same mods here anyway.

Cheers

Just curious, if anyone's familiar with the Derrida, how much knowledge of Husserl is necessary?

Well, if you have given up on this notion of morality, do you still have any moral inclinations? How do you describe/explain what is going on with that (assuming you do)?
Edited.

Yeh I guess to make sense of morality (for me) somethings got to give. By thinking of it this way I can get past issues of moral motivation, or what an ought it is because if it's you making the judgement those issues don't apply. As in the answer to 'why you ought to to what is morally correct' is just that in saying that it's morally correct you want something specific to happen/not happen
.
There isn't a distinction between what I judge to be morally correct and what I judge I should do.

I'm trying to deal with the same problem that you mentioned. Thinking of morality as a set of restrictions which we learn from somewhere has issues. It's like a command without a commander.

You can still believe that you are judging what is correct for everyone in a specific situation, so it doesn't need to follow that it is only moral because you judge it to be moral.

If you yourself judge something to be wrong/undesirable/to-not-be-done, then you don't need some outside force/authority to coerce you.

-I don't see what's to be gained from cordoning off what is a transcedental addition versus what is really in nature 'in itself,' and there seems to be no interest in the project if you're not a Kantian (the question of 'is identity in the mind/language/computer, or in the thing itself?' is only of interest to someone with Kantian assumptions) — The Great Whatever

Yeh I read the analog/digital talk as essentially a restatement of the Kantian view that it's not something out there which "holds objects together" (object = X). Instead concepts are rules in the mind/language - which are therefore always abstractions/simplifications. I'm assuming that the difference here is that there's no transcendental idealism, we do have access to the things themselves 'the analogue system' but it needs to be simplified to be used in language and therefore in logic.

My concern is that if we take this as a limitation, so that identity, negation, formal logic etc. is based on abstraction, what in the end can we say about issues philosophically? Even the split itself of what systems can be considered analogue vs digital is actually a continuum and not a distinct break.

I hardly ever read posts from the politics section of the old forum, and most likely stayed out of political conversations over the years.

Equally happy to generally avoid them here. Let's call it a day then.

Any example of a law in Israel that is only applied to Jewish citizens that have not converted to another religion?

There is plenty of discrimination in Israel but no need to exaggerate it. The law of return itself makes a lot of sense considering history. Yes only those of a specific religion get to take advantage of it and immigrate to Israel with Israeli government help. They can't just have open immigration borders, and as an example, it was about 3/4 of the Dutch Jewish population (roughly 100, 000 people) that died in the Holocaust.

I was about to write out something similar. I think you hit the nail on the head.

To be fair (because I take your statement as a bit of a dig at Israel), the law of return is for non-citizens, not a right reserved only for some citizens as you're implying.

Anyway, if Jew is defined for the purpose of a law I don't think it counts as the definition of a Jew, it's defined for a utility. For instance, US Supreme Court defined Jews as a race to include them in anti discrimination laws.

EDIT: Also as @Hanover mentioned according to the religion Jews who convert are still part of the Jewish religion. So the consideration to exclude the Jews who converted would probably be based on reasons outside of whether they were technically part of the Jewish religion.

Yeh I don't get the views that Paris is necessarily the Capital of France, if we are using Kripke's modal logic.

Yeh this comes from the way you think about mathematics. It's easier rather then to view things as an arbitrary distinction, to try to see where Kant is coming from, to see why he may have an issue with synthetic knowledge.

Kant didn't have the kind of axioms of arithmetic we have today. That isn't the way they worked out that 7+5 = 12.
But further I think the axioms are in some way secondary. Most people know that 7 + 5 = 12 without even knowing that it can be derived from axioms, or what the axioms may be. If we created a formal structure for proving arithmetic and it showed that 7+5 = 11, that we had been wrong the whole time about it equaling 12, we would reject that formal structure before questioning our intuitions.

So it's a question of how we actually know it, how are we justified in our complete certainty that this is a necessary truth.

I think it's also easier when using his other examples, like triangle have 180 degrees. We can prove it in an abstract way, by using examples of a triangle that is meant to stand in for all other triangles etc. It's an operation we can do in our minds, but what gives us the ability to be so certain that the triangle that I draw on a piece of paper will all have that property.

I didn't notice anybody saying that Jews don't exist — andrewk

It was claimed by charleton in this post:

Yes I wouldn't define them based on religion. Most Jews would determine whether someone is Jewish based on conversion or descent (for orthodox only maternal descent is used, other traditions allow paternal). These are the necessary conditions, it's not enough for someone to decide that they are Jewish.

Anyway the main point was not to define them, rather just the claim that Jew was never intended to be a natural category so claiming that like race it isn't one, is off the mark.

I don't really get what you are getting at in the examples.
I do get why Kant thinks 7+5 = 12 is synthetic, whilst all bachelors are unmarried is analytic. So if you elaborate a little I may understand.

What is the article/book he does that in? I'm a bit wary of psychological explanations especially when they're used to explain away positions that I don't agree with (they often appear more convincing then they should be).

I wonder if perhaps this means that murder being immoral isn't something you understand but something you feel. — Michael

Recently I've been liking the idea of morality being something you Judge. Understanding and feeling are both too passive.

Also just had a look at the age ranges in the paper, only 9 of the philosophers interviewed were born after 1980. Which could be relevant if people want to claim that there has been a cultural shift.

Funny that this exact conversation occurred in 2 threads. Pretty sure the paper Throngil is talking about is this one:
http://philpapers.org/archive/BOUWDP

&
Yeh fair points. Anti realism comes much more naturally to me and most the people I speak to about ethics. I feel like moral realism takes a lot more work than anti-realism unless people take a very naive realist position. This feeling is probably because of the culture.

Personally philosophy has effected my views of ethics and some of the views I have towards dealing with others. If I don't include the time I spend thinking about philosophy or reading it then the overall effect on my life is very minor.

For the most part I don't read philosophy with the intention of it effecting my life. For example, I couldn't tell you what would even be a possible effect of reading Frege's The Foundations of Arithmetic aside from finding it enjoyable or satisfying.

I'm currently interested in how views on modal logic have changed over time. This will definitely not effect my life at all and outside of the forum I wouldn't even mention it to people.

If you take seriously the Chalmers survey results:

Meta-ethics: moral realism 56.4%; moral anti-realism 27.7%; other 15.9%.
God: atheism 72.8%; theism 14.6%; other 12.6%.

http://philpapers.org/archive/BOUWDP

So I get the argument that race 'doesn't exist' to speak loosely. The same arguments for race do not apply when speaking about Jews. The issue is nothing to do with whether Jews can be defined as a race, rather it makes sense to look at how one defines a particular individual as a Jew.
Traditional way is that if your mother is Jewish or you convert to Judaism then you are a Jew. There was never a claim that Jews could be identified genetically or biologically. Jews are members of a religion.

Because of relatively low amount of converts and the long history many Jews do share certain genetic traits, and a cultural history but it's quite diverse and depends a lot on where they are from.

To say that race doesn't exist therefore Jews don't exist is completely mistaken.

I never thought I'd say this again, I've been making my way through the CPR. I've encountered too many Kant and Hegel references recently that I feel I need to read Hegel (never wanted to) and refresh Kant before doing that.

It's extremely different going through it the second time (first was about 5 years ago and I misinterpreted it almost completely). The biggest difference is knowing the terminology, Kant himself never gives good or even any explanation for a lot of the terms he uses.

I disagree with the view that Kant is a bad writer. When you know the terms a lot of the CPR flows quite well. So far it's actually been very enjoyable much more than the secondary literature on Nietzsche and Deleuze that I've been reading lately.

Bernstein lectures on Kant have been nice entertainment whilst driving.

Any more suggestions? — jamalrob

You just believe that because... Roger White

I share your views about thinking of morality and moral behaviour and psychology in abstract and rational terms. We typically and primarily relate to morality emotionally. I think that most people mean the same, or at least similar things, when that say that such-and-such is wrong, but then philosophers come along and overcomplicate things. What most people express is disapproval. This is the case whether they mean to state an objective truth or just their subjective judgement. I believe that fundamental underlying meaningful elements behind the use of common moral language can be known if one takes a reductionist approach, and I further believe that the most useful and meaningful results can be found if one examines subjectivity rather than depart on a wild goose chase by seeking moral objectivity - which, if it does exist, is basically redundant - even if it could be proven. — Sapientia

Yeh I'm with the view about starting from subjectivity, I don't even really get the idea of taking moral language as the starting point. To me it's almost two different things, what morality is and how we talk about it. It would be like taking language as the starting point to proving that process philosophy is false as we talk about objects. Language already includes a way of conceptualizing morality and I think the general way of talking about it is already mistaken. Otherwise you run into issues like the Frege - Geach problem.

But from this my issue arises, what is this persons relationship to the rule. Because people do think to themselves 'I want to do X but its against the moral rule Y'. So the relationship must be more complex than 'I disapprove of X'.

Well, fiction is an odd business, to invent it you have to enter in some way into the imagination of the character you're writing about. I had set up the daughter of the (woman) protagonist to be an annoyingly-right child, so I got her (at age nine) to disrupt the household by suddenly asserting the rights of animals - throwing out clothes, refusing food, insisting on separate eating utensils from her disgusting carnivorous brother. And I just emerged from writing the situation, thinking, beyond fiction - this girl is right! — mcdoodle

I really love this. Its seems so much more human to me then if you went to a philosophy class and got convinced of utilitarianism.

I guess my thinking here is that, though we set out our arguments in the form of persuasion, it might be helpful for people to understand that, in philosophy, few are persuaded. So, at least insofar that we believe philosophy is actually worthwhile, we must be doing something else aside from persuading (though, on the rare chance, we are sometimes persuaded too -- it's just not the norm, at least not within a particular conversation). — Moliere

Been sitting exams and I don't go on forums when in study mode so this is a little late.

I agree, it would be nice if more conversations were seen as working together on an issue rather than against each other.

Yeh its great. If you want to relive it a little, Daniel Coffeen has a half hour talk about it on his podcast. He's ridiculously into it so it makes for good listening.
https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/danielcoffeens-podcast/id305353009?mt=2

I'm only part way though, I've had to put it on hold for the last couple of months. I've got some time off in a couple of weeks and will hopefully finish it then. Would be great to discuss afterward.