How is the conclusion different from the premise (other then lexically)? What am I missing?

A meaningless debate might go something like this

"of shcrik in the water too"

"gavagai"

I have no idea what those terms mean. It is purely nonsense.

So given that standard I'd likely say there isn't such a thing, insofar that the words have meaning. — Moliere

It is true that accusations of "meaninglessness" (as well as some others, such as "incoherency") are often thrown around rather loosely. But, returning to the topic of the thread, you need to remember that Carnap was a positivist, and so he had stringent and, perhaps to our ear, rather idiosyncratic criteria of meaningfulness.

But let's not nitpick vocabulary. I think the idea in this particular instance is that some debates just lack substance and worth. Some - in fact, probably many - questions that have been mainstays of philosophy, and metaphysics in particular, are pseudo-questions.

My own approach when it comes to questions of ontology, debates over realism vs. nominalism, etc. is to ask, What is at stake? Why is this important? What difference in our worldview would one position make vs. the other? If it seems to me that nothing substantial is at stake, except perhaps minor differences in language, then I judge such questions to be - let's say "worthless," if you don't like "meaningless."

You did so on the grounds that anti-metaphysical statements are meaningless. You even stated as much in the first sentence of the previous post. — Marchesk

Well, no, not unless you believe that metaphysical questions are necessarily as vague and pointless as the one I was criticizing. My most charitable take on metaphysics is that it is a search for and a critical analysis of framing - and that is not meaningless.

what motivates the questioning — SophistiCat

The difference between the individual things we perceive, and our universal talk about them. — Marchesk

That makes no sense, no matter how many times you say this. Come on, Marchesk, you are not even trying.

(2) what it is that you actually want explained, and (3) what kind of an explanation you require. — SophistiCat

(2) Whether there is something in the world which matches or supports our universal talk.

(3) An argument for something in the world or in our concepts that explain the universal talk. — Marchesk

That is still much too vague. There are many ways in which such a question could be cached out: we could analyze our language, starting with universal talk and perhaps going on to causal talk (which is one of the directions this conversation has taken). We could analyze our psychology/cognition - and here there is also a variety of approaches. We could talk about "the world" (i.e. the intended objects of our universal talk) - and here the possibilities are too many to number. We could also talk about the interrelationship between all these spheres, which broadens the scope to a truly unmanageable size.

(4) There have been at least 4 possible answers given to this question: nominalism, conceptualism, moderate realism (Aristotle), and realism (Platonism). — Marchesk

There are so, so many more ways to address the general topic "universals" - at least until you frame the question better than you have done so far. But in any case, to paraphrase Crispin Wright, identifying your position with one of the above labels accomplishes about as much as clearing one's throat.


I was wondering, by the way, what it is that you were trying for with your programming analogy. A class in object-oriented programming (OOP) is not a good analogy for the general idea of universals. In OOP two objects with the same functional properties are not necessarily instances of the same class. Indeed, being an instance of a particular class is itself a property, which can be directly queried in languages that support reflection. That would not make sense with universals: being a member of a class is not a property that is distinct from the sum of properties that defines that class. Being a member of the class of blue things is exactly the same as being blue (which is the point that @Snakes Alive already made).

I guess you were looking for some causal, generative account of differences and similarities between things. But I am afraid that such an overly general approach is not going to be a productive direction for inquiry; you need to bring more focus to it. (And turning back to OOP for a moment, a slightly better but still imperfect analogy for universals would be an interface or a completely abstract class, which defines "phenomenal" properties of objects. But interfaces are not generative: conceptually, they are used to abstract properties from existing things or describe hypothetical properties that may or may not exist.)

Well, I explained why your question makes no sense, but alas, all you can think of is poisoning the well. Never mind, I think others here make a much better job of making this discussion substantive and interesting than you do.

That we can directly experience/feel/perceive causation is one of the positions that has been staked and defended by philosophers such as Ducasse, Armstrong, Anscombe among others - but it is by no means uncontroversial. However, I think that disagreements here are more about the conceptualization of causality in general than about empirical facts of cognition.

You might be interested in this article though: The Psychology of Causal Perception and Reasoning (PDF) by David Danks from Oxford Handbook of Causation.

The question and proposed answers can be boiled down to this observation:

We perceive a world of individuals, yet our language is full of universal categories of properties and relations. So how do we reconcile the two? — Marchesk

See, right away you show me right. What you came up with is a pseudo-question: although it has the grammatical form of a question, it is actually quite senseless. It is not clear what motivates the questioning, what it is that you actually want explained, and what kind of an explanation you require. And of course there is no answer either, despite your insistence otherwise - and how could there be when there is no real question?

In the subsequent discussion @Srap Tasmaner has to do all the work for you so as to come up with some more sensible questions to ask. But are the questions of psychology, cognition and causality that @Janus then picks up upon what you had in mind for this discussion?

How our language comes to have universal concepts when the world is full of individuals. What is it about the individual things that leads us to form universal properties and relations such that we can group them into categories?

One possible answer is that universal properties and relations exist in the world in some manner. — Marchesk

Such fragmentary thoughts dispersed throughout your posts hint at other kinds of questions, but they are too undeveloped to make much sense of.

Why do you assume that neuroscience has to account for things like the "subconscious mind?" The subconscious is not something that is truly and undeniably known to us from experience - it is a posit of some rather old-fashioned psychological theories. Other, more modern and more scientifically-oriented theories of mind may not even have a use for such a concept.

While I largely agree that the question of universals is more or less rubbish, it seems to me that its no less a jumping of the gun to say that the question is psychological. — StreetlightX

The point isn't that similarity is a psychological issue – I don't think that makes any sense. But the question of how people come to recognize similarities surely is. — Snakes Alive

The point, I think, is that any good, meaningful question already presupposes, if not a particular answer, then a particular kind of answer. Simply asking "Why this?" makes as much sense as the babbling of a baby. Snakes Alive is right in that a psychological question would be a suitable question to ask, but StreetlightX is right in that this is a question, not the one and only question - at least we should not assume that it is without some reflection. And that is what philosophy is good for: looking for good questions to ask and dissolving bad, pseudo-question. (Of course, most often good questions occur to us as a matter of course, as we learn new facts and develop our conceptual tools, e.g. via scientific theories.)

And that is the root of @Marchesk's problem: after so many pages of discussion, not only can he not explain the answer and how it actually answers the question, he cannot even explain what the question is and why it needs to be answered.

You are not offering a counter-argument, you are denying the premise - two premises in fact: that time is infinite and that infinite time provides sufficient probabilistic resources for Boltzmann brains to dominate the set of observers.

But this is rather beside the point anyway, because the Boltzmann brain scenario gets most of its probabilistic resources not from infinite time but from infinite space.

To be clear, I have no problem with abstractions or relations etc... they are usefull to be sure, as long as we don't forget they are abstractions. — ChatteringMonkey

Well, anything we contemplate becomes an abstraction in our mind. This goes for "things" as well as not-"things".

What is the difference you ask? The idea of timetravel for instance is nonsensical if time is not real. — ChatteringMonkey

Why not? We travel forward in time, obviously, and that makes perfect sense. We also can orient and move in space in any directions, and space is just as "abstract" as time, isn't it? The question of why we cannot (easily) travel backwards in time both makes sense to ask and not trivial to answer.

If time is just the measurement of change, and not some kind of 'thing' that literally exists, or that 'flows' or has an arrow or what have you.... would it still make sense in Einsteins special relativity? — ChatteringMonkey

I am not sure I understand what tension you see here. So there are "things" that "literally exist" - what are those things? Tangible things that you see, touch, smell? And then anything that does not "literally exist" - it does not make sense at all? So relations, for example, do not make sense? But how do we make sense of the world without relations?

I'm looking to do away with what might be a mistaken metaphysical notion of time, as a thing... — ChatteringMonkey

What would "time as a thing" or conversely "time as not a thing" imply metaphysically or otherwise? What difference would drawing such a distinction make to anything?

We all understand that time is not a thing in the same way that cat or a mat are things, for example. But... what of it?

Are you saying that manipulation and deception are morally neutral? It does not seem possible that you think truth and falsehood are morally equivalent, for then indeed there is nothing to be said worth anything. But if not, then deception must be justified by an utilitarian argument of greater good. — unenlightened

I think at that point we'd have to ask -- what makes it ethically acceptable? — Moliere

I want to challenge this presumption that an action can only be given an ethical valuation by sorting it into some preexisting categories - or more generally, reducing it to something else. And if I answer Moliere's question, i.e. point to something else as a reason for my moral valuation, wouldn't the next question be "What justifies the valuation of that thing?" And why choose this reduction and not some other? Now I admit that reductive ethical analysis of particular situations is a very practical thing to do, and in many cases the analysis can be made straightforward by making use of heuristic shortcuts (e.g. "do no harm"), but in contentious cases we should not just blindly assume things.

And we should be especially wary of simplistic formalism, such as two legs deception = bad.

I am skeptical of all formalism when it comes to ethics, i.e. I am skeptical about a priori ethical theories and principles, be they based on utility or virtue or something else. As descriptions of our ethical reasoning they can work more-or-less well, but not as justifications in themselves.

The way we often approach ethical problems is by finding resemblance with iconic cases, about which we have strong moral opinions. But this reduction base of iconic cases is itself not given to us at birth, once and for all. It grows and evolves, and a case that was once in question can in time join the store of iconic cases, while another iconic case may be judged to be insufficiently indicative or altogether deprecated. Thus I am not being flippant when I say that the argument that says that the Asch experiment (say) is unethical because it looks suspiciously like gaslighting can be turned around. If I take the Asch experiment as a paradigmatic example of an ethical experiment that nonetheless has some parallels with the nightmarish scenario described in the play "Gaslight," then my takeaway is that not every case that can be loosely characterized as gaslighting is ethically unacceptable.

I'll meet @unenlightened half-way in conceding that deception and manipulation is prima facie ethically suspect, so we should take particular care in such cases. But that's as far as I'll go. How can we take care? Well, if the case is not obvious, we can try weighing the good against the bad (whether utilitarian or otherwise). For example, many competitive games involve deception and manipulation and other adversarial tactics, and if that was all there was to such games, then playing them would be hard to justify to oneself. But many people see some good in playing games (with certain reservations, obviously), and that must outweigh whatever qualms they might have about tactics. (For a more controversial example listen to this This American Life story about one man's experience playing Diplomacy.)

I don't know if I buy that science is a justification. Science doesn't lead to progress. It leads to knowledge. And knowledge is value-neutral -- it can be used for good or ill. — Moliere

In my book seeking knowledge is a good in and of itself, irregardless of whether it leads to progress and whether progress itself is good. It is not such good that can override any other consideration, but it is good. I generally approve of science, although not being an expert, I cannot really gauge the quality of psychological theories and experiments qua science.

TO MAKE A LONG STORY SHORT, SS troops didn't guard Auschwitz for the same reasons American troops killed peasants at Mai Lai, and American college students didn't participate in Milgram's experiments for the same reasons that Germans calmly watched Jews being shipped off "to the east". — Bitter Crank

Well, that is what motivates studies (or "demonstrations") like Zimbardo's and Milgrams on the one hand, and serves as the main target for criticism on the other: the idea that there are some elements, some psychological mechanisms that these seemingly very different actions have in common, and that those elements are key to understanding them (and perhaps for affecting positive changes).

It beggars belief — unenlightened

That kind of describes my reaction to your posts here, U. I don't know what to think of your exaggerated slippery-slope appeals. I am afraid there is not a sufficient common ground for us to have a discussion.

I take your point about honesty, or what you call authenticity in relationships. At the end of the day it all boils down not to formal, factual criteria, like whether some deception or some manipulation is taking place, but to an ethical valuation of the entire action, which is itself not reducible to any matters of fact or to any labels. The question thus posed becomes simple to formulate but not always simple to answer.

Is a researcher conducting a psychological experiment on other people acting ethically? That was the actual question behind this side discussion. And after all is said the answer does not become any more obvious than it was at the beginning of the discussion. If I feel that a psychological experiment is ethically acceptable, then pointing out that this experiment involves manipulation and deception won't change my mind. Without even appealing to counter-examples, like I did before, I could just turn the argument around and say that, since clearly this experiment is ethically acceptable, then some manipulation and deception can be ethically acceptable.

I was surprised to find that by the end of the paragraph I was writing about Snyder I was once again addressing the issue supposedly raised by Zimbardo, the responsibility of individuals in situations. Snyder is not a psychologist, but he works as an anti-Zimbardo. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I think I understand what you mean. It's hard to say just what Zimbardo aimed to prove - his 'experiment' was a mess and the legacy of his activism appears to be mixed. There is this view that he and the likes of him attempted to shift the responsibility from individuals to situations, circumstances. I don't know. The question of responsibility is a difficult one, and the answer won't come from facts alone. Like with all ethical questions, ought does not follow from is.

A different question about Milgram and Zimbardo: By the time they began their research, we had been through 2 world wars, a brutal regional war in Korea, and were in the middle of a second brutal regional war in Vietnam. Much research has been published on the behavior of the SS, the Gestapo, Jews, Aryans, et al in Germany during the years of National Socialism. Was there something that history wasn't telling Milgram, Simbardo, et al about manipulation, brutality, dehumanization, submission, studied ignorance, and so forth that wasn't available in the histories? — Bitter Crank

As a side-note, while reading the SPE article in particular, as well as some of the others, I was struck by the choice of historical examples that journalists used to illustrate the relevance of their stories: the Nazis, the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. (The choice was not entirely subjective: the latter two events also marked a spike in the public interest in the SPE study with its promise of rationalization.) OK, so Nazi crimes are a common reference. But why the My Lai massacre and not any of the atrocities perpetrated by other sides of the conflict? Why Abu Ghraib abuses and not the torture and abuse in Iraqi-ran prisons that went on since well before the US invasion, and continues uninterrupted to this day (not to mention numerous other places around the world)?

There is, of course, the famous American insularity, obliviousness to anything that does not directly concern them. But I suspect that there is also a kind of racism at work: it is one thing when some swarthy Orientals do something horrible - that's the sort of thing they would do, wouldn't they? It is only when our American boys are doing it that the incidents cry out for an explanation. And the effect of this attitude is that such incidents appear to be very rare and atypical, and can after all be dismissed as freak occurrences, while the people involved can be dismissed as a few bad apples that just need to be sorted out. That is probably why experiments like Milgram's are found to be so disconcerting, as if the facts themselves, rather than their interpretations, were something new and unexpected.

I want to circle back on a point made in the OP article:

The appeal of the Stanford prison experiment seems to go deeper than its scientific validity, perhaps because it tells us a story about ourselves that we desperately want to believe: that we, as individuals, cannot really be held accountable for the sometimes reprehensible things we do. As troubling as it might seem to accept Zimbardo’s fallen vision of human nature, it is also profoundly liberating. It means we’re off the hook. Our actions are determined by circumstance.

“You have a vertigo when you look into it,” Le Texier explained. “It’s like, ‘Oh my god, I could be a Nazi myself. I thought I was a good guy, and now I discover that I could be this monster.’ And in the meantime, it’s quite reassuring, because if I become a monster, it’s not because deep inside me I am the devil, it’s because of the situation. I think that’s why the experiment was so famous in Germany and Eastern Europe. You don’t feel guilty. ‘Oh, okay, it was the situation. We are all good guys. No problem. It’s just the situation made us do it.’ So it’s shocking, but at the same time it’s reassuring. I think these two messages of the experiment made it famous.” — Ben Blum

I rather see a danger in a different kind of self-satisfied complacency: Such terrible things happen rarely, and with people that are not like us. Surely, I am not capable of this, people I know are not capable of this. It can't happen here!

Open your eyes! It has been happening everywhere, all the time! That's not a reason to put all the blame on the situation, of course. But neither should we delude ourselves in thinking that we and the people around us are immune, that we have progressed, learned our lessons, became finer, kinder creatures. The fuck we did.

The philosophers of science, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, have long been writing about the insufficiency of the Milgram 'experiments' - which themselves made me suspicious of the Prison experiment - for quite some time. — StreetlightX

I don't really understand your or Latour's point here. Insufficiency for what? Milgram himself had certain psychological models in mind that he wanted to test with his experiments; he also believed that the experiments provided clues to the psychology of willing collaborators in Nazi atrocities. I am aware that, in light of those models and those examples, his experiments have been criticized for various infidelities, and alternative interpretations have been proposed. His data has been reanalyzed and criticized (but there have also been successful replications). And of course, there are grave ethical problems with those experiments. But I don't understand what this criticism is about:

Only in the name of science is Stanley Milgram’s experiment possible ... In any other situation, the students would have punched Milgram in the face… — Latour

For me the larger lesson is that ordinary people are quite capable of doing horrible things in circumstances that are not even that extraordinary - the banality of evil, as Arendt famously put it. Of course, as @Bitter Crank points out, we already know this, or should know, if we pay attention to what has been going on around us. A scientific experiment is intended not to prove the point, but to tease out the mechanisms behind this phenomenon, and that is what Milgram attempted to do. Whether or not he was successful, that is a matter for careful analysis and replication, not breathy rhetoric. It is easy for Latour to sit there and speculate about what the students would have done "in any other situation." Milgram meanwhile conducted a number of variations of the experiment to see just what they would do in which situations. And indeed, in some setups he saw "obedience rate" plunge all the way to zero (the widely circulated figure of 66% was obtained in only one of the experiments).

Firstly, a small dispute: sure we all lie and manipulate, we are all sinners, but not all our lives. — unenlightened

I don't think you have to resort to hermitude. (is that a word?) to avoid playing games. It's just a matter of having an authentic relationship with someone. — Moliere

Deceptive and manipulative behavior isn't always a sin, and when it is, it isn't necessarily a big deal - that's my point. We do it all the time, even unconsciously, and often for good reasons: when we try to look our best, when we try to be persuasive, when we are being tactful, when we try to make someone feel good (or bad), when we avoid giving "too much information." And then there are different degrees and modes of candidness that are appropriate to different relationships: with your spouse, with your child, with a friend, with a colleague, with a shop clerk, with a police officer, etc. Someone who is absolutely candid with everyone at all times would be rightly considered a sociopath. (I know someone who says that he despises movies and theater, because he values truth and honesty. I think he is a douche.)

There are tolerable and even desirable levels of "dishonesty," and I don't see why all of experimental psychology should be put into a zero-tolerance category. What was so distasteful or harmful about, say, Asch conformity experiments, in which an unsuspecting subject was placed among a group of actors who attempted to influence his or her judgment of the relative lengths of lines drawn on a piece of paper? (Here is another example of a psychology experiment that is as well-known as it is widely misrepresented - but in this case not by the author but by popular media and even textbooks!)


Will reply later, sorry.

Here is another one for you:

The “Robbers Cave experiment” is considered seminal by social psychologists, still one of the best-known examples of “realistic conflict theory”. It is often cited in modern research. But was it scientifically rigorous? And why were the results of the Middle Grove experiment – where the researchers couldn’t get the boys to fight – suppressed? “Sherif was clearly driven by a kind of a passion,” Perry says. “That shaped his view and it also shaped the methods he used. He really did come from that tradition in the 30s of using experiments as demonstrations – as a confirmation, not to try to find something new.” In other words, think of the theory first and then find a way to get the results that match it. If the results say something else? Bury them. — A real-life Lord of the Flies: the troubling legacy of the Robbers Cave experiment

As for why study this - as if we didn't already know that people can treat each other horribly - the job of a social psychologist, like that of any scientist, is to try to understand the hows and the whys, to find patterns and regularities, to expose hidden connections, to cut nature at its joints - that sort of thing. More practically, as you can read in these stories, such studies are often motivated by lofty goals (but just as often nowadays by commercial interests ). Nowadays when lay people talk about the Stanford Prison Experiment, their interest is usually in human psychology in general, or in trying to find an explanation for some (seemingly) extraordinary atrocity. But Zimbardo and others who promoted his "experiment" were interested in very ordinary and practical things, such as criminal justice and the penal system. They believed that they could and should make a difference. And what makes this story even more ambivalent is that their beliefs and prescriptions weren't all wrong either - just not necessarily for the reasons stated.

The problem is that human psychology and social dynamics are so very complex, and we want to see a simple pattern, a story that will neatly explain it all. You can see it in Zimbardo's case, and in Sherif's, how they were seduced by the simplicity of their favored explanations to the point that they could not and would not see the confounding complexities of the real life.

As far as that goes, reading Timothy Snyder's Black Earth can be a pretty strange experience. — Srap Tasmaner

Sounds like this is someone who is brave enough to face the imponderable complexities and honestly concede ignorance when simple explanations are found to be lacking. But saying that "people did what they chose to, period" is not even an attempt at an explanation, this is just giving up. We don't have to give up trying to find explanations, we just have to be honest and patient and never trust stereotypes and preconceptions.

I was told by my Psychology 101 professor that the Stanford Prison Experiment became so out of control that it had to be shut down early. I held that false belief for years. It is so irritating how you cannot believe what anybody says without investigating it for yourself. — GodlessGirl

Well, the story told by Zimbardo is that it was a fellow psychologist (and later his wife) who was horrified by what she saw and persuaded Zimbardo to stop the experiment early, so what you were told is not far from the truth - assuming that is the truth (AFAIK we don't know any different).

And the larger story of experimental psychology is always one of deceit and manipulation in the name of truth and progress. — unenlightened

Yes, as if the subject of psychology wasn't hellishly complex enough, psychologists' work is further complicated by the difficulty of conducting experiments on human subjects. As science goes, in terms of pure logistics psychologists aren't the worst off (just ask geologists or cosmologists), but the ethical difficulties are pretty much unique to social sciences. On the other hand, we already are social creatures, and we engage in manipulative games all our lives. Is it so much worse to engage in "deceit and manipulation in the name of truth and progress" than to do the same for your selfish purposes, or just for fun?

Setting aside extreme cases like the ones discussed here and looking at "the larger story of experimental psychology," I think you are rather exaggerating the harm of such games. We are, on the whole, psychologically pretty robust, otherwise how could we survive our daily interactions with other people? For one who has an absolute distaste for manipulation and deception the only choice is to be a hermit, I suppose.

Here is an op-ed by a psychologist who did not include the Stanford study in his textbook - and he made that decision while taking Zimbardo's report at face value, based on a careful and critical analysis of the study's (declared) methodology. Some of the follow-up comments and the author's responses are interesting as well.

The author and some of the commenters also note that, given that the "guards" were most likely doing what they thought was expected of them, the setup was closer to that of the Milgram studies, except that Milgram was explicit about what he was studying, and he attempted to tease out the circumstances in which his subjects did and did not end up following orders.

And here is a critical article about the Milgram experiment: Rethinking One of Psychology's Most Infamous Experiments. From what I have read though, it seems that the Milgram experiment was more sound, although there is a lot of doubt about its interpretation.

For a broad overview you can't go wrong with the SEP:

Free Will

And you can drill down from there. You may also want to read some of the articles listed in the Related Entries section at the bottom.

I think Einstein is an excellent example of overlap. Though he was educated as a physicist, he was a philosopher. His theories did not derive from empirical evidence obtained from a laboratory. He worked in a patent office. Instead, his theories were derived in large part from his obsessive nature, his interest in physics, and his almost child-like imagination. And when he published those theories, they were met with very strong opinions of agreement or disagreement. But they were not met with demands for "proof." Instead, most of the ensuing empirical "proof" regarding his theories was provided by scientists who developed clever experiments for that very purpose. — Arne

While I agree with the gist of this - there is a conspicuous philosophical backbone in Einstein's theories - Einstein was not a metaphysician working in some rarefied abstract sphere. He was very well aware of contemporary developments in science, and his first major works were motivated by specific problems in physics, both experimental (the Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect) and theoretical (Maxwell's electrodynamics and its apparent inconsistency with the relativity of speed, the ultraviolet catastrophe). Arguably, his General Relativity was motivated more by philosophical considerations than any specific problems known at that time.

Is the argument against the easing of hostilities based on the fact that Kim is a brutal dictator? Is it more about protecting the interests of the USA in the region? Perhaps some combination of these along with additional things? For me the initial goal should be the modest one of lessening hostilities by opening up dialogue. It's a positive first step; nothing more and nothing less. — Erik

The thing is, this whole cycle of escalation/deescalation is pretty much entirely driven by NK. They ramp up the tensions, then when things almost seem to come to a head, they relent and say "let's talk." Ceremonial talks, handshakes, smiles, speeches with vague promises follow. Everybody sighs in relief: hostilities avoided! NK goes home with some tangible rewards without giving anything in return (other than deescalation of tensions, which it manufactured in the first place.) It's basically behaving like an enfant terrible that nobody knows what to do with. And there's the problem: is there anything better that can be done?

Sure it works. It works for bodylenght, so why not for intelligence. If we want to determine whether someone is short or tall, we compare them to the average height. Next to this we can express their height in cm or inches, the latter doesn't tell whether someone is tall or short without a known average.

In case of children we even correct the measured lenght for age, same as with iq tests. Why assume it won't work if the same appraoch clearly works for other things we measure? — Tomseltje

So how about if we measure weight with a thermometer? (We'll just call it a "weight-measuring device"... for good measure.) We are measuring something, we can do comparisons, calculate average, etc. We should be good, right?

Where am I going wrong with this? Your entire argument is that intelligence is adequately measured by intelligence tests because "intelligence tests" measure "intelligence" - what else could they be doing? Boom, done!

Don't you see how empty and useless such talk is? Look, you can't contribute meaningfully to a conversation about IQ tests if you don't want to get into the substance of the matter. What is intelligence? Is it something that can be measured on a scale? How can it be measured? Are existing tests adequate for the purpose? And what are such tests good for, anyway? These questions cannot be answered with wordplay alone.

The block universe is just one way of conceptualizing the universe; the fact that we can think of the universe this way by itself does not testify in favor of a particular metaphysical theory of time.

But your question is valid and interesting, and it really comes down to the question of why we remember the past and not the future. That is the reason why all moments of your existence are not jumbled together in your mind: memory. From the B-theory's perspective you can think of yourself as your entire trajectory through the spacetime "block", but what gives you your perception of location at each point on that trajectory is this asymmetry of memory.

We do have a standard for both volume measurement and iq measurement to compare it too. — Tomseltje

You keep saying this, but when you are asked what that standard is, you demur or insist that the measurement is the standard.

Simple, we have different kind of iq tests. Had all been 100% accurate, there would be no difference. However, when we use different tests, the results differ, hence either one of the tests used is inaccurate, or both are. — Tomseltje

No, that won't work either. If intelligence is just what the tests measure, and you insist that this is the case for all tests of intelligence, then different results can only mean that intelligence is different in each case.

Tomseltje, you should understand by now that you cannot cheat your way out with this simple maneuver of equating intelligence with test results. Even setting aside the issue of accuracy, suppose we accept your idiosyncratic definition of intelligence - what then? So you have a device that measures something, and all we know about that something is that it is just what the device measures.



If you want to have a substantive discussion, you have to address the question of what intelligence is, and how intelligence tests can measure it, how accurate and how useful such tests are, etc. But for that you actually have to care and know something about the subject, and I don't think that you do.

Besides, an IQ test does not merely give a binary answer: is or is not intelligent - it is supposed to measure the amount of intelligence on a unidimensional scale, which makes a much stronger claim about what intelligence is than there simply being necessary and sufficient criteria for its presence.

Does a measuring cylinder measure the amount of a liquid one puts in it? — Tomseltje

Yes. But here you have liquid, or liquid volume, and a measurement of that volume, and the two are not necessarily the same. We could say that the reading from the measuring cylinder is accurate or not if we compare it with a more accurate measurement. Or, if we are realists, we could say that the measurement corresponds or not to the actual volume. But all this makes sense only if the liquid volume can be given independently of what the measuring cylinder is gauging. Otherwise they are one and the same and to say that a measurement is or is not accurate makes no sense.

Well I suppose at that point Kantian vs. Utilitarian vs. Virtue ethics will be settled. I guess I'd just pray that Kant was right -- that any hyper-intelligent "rational" being is confined to deontological morality by virtue of practical reason -- though I'm not a Kantian, so I suspect it's more likely we'd be tortured to death, enslaved, or just plain obliterated. — John Doe

Heh, you don't have to go far for examples - no need for intergalactic travel - just look at us. Kantian or not, that's what we've been doing with each other, not to mention other animals.

The Cray-1 in 1975 was put at +9. It is not unlikely that something that can traverse the gulfs of the void would be several points higher than us. It is no exaggeration to say that they very well may look at us the way we look at ants. — Akanthinos

Or they may have been around a little bit longer, or their scientific and technological achievement curve was a little steeper for whatever reason. We've only been around as a species for a few hundred thousand years - a wink on the universal scale - and our achievement curve has a hockey stick shape, with the upward slope occurring over the last few hundred years. Perhaps all it takes is for a species very similar to ours to be slightly offset in time or to have a slightly different history.

This is a quote from a Scientific American article. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-octopus/

Octopuses and their relatives (cuttlefish and squid) represent an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Since my first encounters with these creatures about a decade ago, I have been intrigued by the powerful sense of engagement that is possible when interacting with them. Our most recent common ancestor is so distant—more than twice as ancient as the first dinosaurs—that they represent an entirely independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can connect with them as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. They are probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.

The intelligence and (possibly) consciousness of octopuses seems to me to provide evidence that the evolution of sentience is not an unlikely event. I've heard it speculated that human intelligence evolved in order to support complex social and linguistic behavior, but it is my understanding octopuses are not social. Maybe if we figure out what we share with these mollusks we'll have a better idea what we might share with extraterrestrial visitors. — T Clark

These are interesting thoughts and observations. One thing I would like to note though is that brain size and even the sheer amount of cognitive activity should not be equated to what we usually think of as "intelligence." A lion's share (so to speak) of brain processing power - both in humans and in other animals like octopuses - is devoted to visual and other sense processing, involving little or no conscious reflection.

I have no problem with questioning the validity of IQ tests, wich in my opinion are still not 100% accurate, especially when applied interculturally. Everything measured in applied science that get's represented by numbers has an error margin. Obviously that error margin is greater when one applies iq tests interculturally compared to intraculturally. — Tomseltje

If IQ tests measure intelligence and intelligence is nothing other than what IQ tests measure, then I cannot see how an IQ test can be inaccurate, even in principle. In order to say that a measurement is inaccurate, you would need some more reliable criterion to use as a comparison. Even if no other measurement is possible, one might still say that the measurement diverges from what the property that is being measured actually is (assuming one is a realist about that property). But by your definition the property being measured is nothing other than the result of the measurement, and the result of the measurement cannot fail to be what it is.

You seem to be making a psychological point here, that we are not "completely rational", and I have no argument with that; granted that we are not perfectly rational enquirers, in the most narrow sense of 'rational'. — Janus

No, my point is not that we are unable to find the completely rational understanding due to our own limitations, but that there may not be this completely rational understanding to be found - it's not out there, waiting to be discovered. Not only is there no necessity about the world, its existence and its shape, but even for this contingent reality there isn't a single right way to understand it. Even if we had all the facts that we cared to know, we still could find different ways to make them intelligible for ourselves.

And yes, I arrive at this conclusion through reasoning, so if you want to say that the PSR is at work here in the sense that whatever I find to be reasonable to believe must have sufficient reasons in my mind, then sure.

The one point where I remain unsatisfied with your argument is that you seem to want to claim that humans do not always reason in terms that presuppose, explicitly or even just implicitly, that there are sufficient reasons to be discovered for whatever they are reasoning about, and yet you have not provided an example of a reasoning which could be shown to be such as to support that claim. — Janus

Well, this may sound immodest, but you have me for an example - see above. The reason I don't presuppose that there are sufficient reasons to be discovered is simply that I don't see any reasons to make such an a priori commitment. I try to make sense of what I see, because that is in my nature, but I admit that the world doesn't owe me an explanation. The world has appeared fairly "reasonable" to my eyes up to now, but I realize that no reason - only my inductive instincts - justifies the assumption that it will continue to do so. And that there may be more to the world than is evident to my eyes. And that that which I see and understand can be reasonably understood differently.

A related question is whether something being a sufficient reason for the existence of something else rules out that there could be other, or even more fundamental reasons, for that existence. To assert that would be to assert that nothing but the ultimate origin and ground of all things (whatever that could be) could qualify as being the sufficient reason for anything. If you wanted to argue for an alternative that could still affirm that, I would be happy to see what you come up with. — Janus

That will depend on how one construes sufficient reason. Spinoza apparently took it in a strong sense, which requires a commitment to necessitarianism. More generally, beyond the scope of the classical PSR, reasons, causes, explanations have been treated in more fluid and varied ways, which do not necessarily imply necessitarianism or even foundationalism. But that is a topic too broad to be covered here.

First I must say that, for all the good will that I have towards Ukraine, I have very little trust in their SBU (secret police) and authorities in general.

That said, if we take what we are being told at face value, then, as others here have noted, this sting operation was not unusual. According to some law enforcement experts, such operations are routinely conducted in countries all over the world. The difference here was all the publicity surrounding the fake assassination, due to Babchenko being a pretty well-known public figure in those parts, and of course due to the politics of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. But (again, taking a view charitable to the SBU) the publicity was not the point. They did not need it to catch the organizer of the hit; according to the information that has been released, the SBU knew who he was for up to two months before the event. But for an investigator to "know" something is not the same as having a solid proof that a prosecutor can take to court. This is why (supposedly) they needed to drag the ruse all the way through the fake assassination. Presumably, the would-be hit man then got in touch with the organizer in order to finalize the deal and get his payment, giving his handlers the opportunity to obtain actionable evidence.

As for the notion that journalists take some equivalent of a Hippocratic oath that for the rest of their lives forbids them to participate in any deception for any reason whatsoever, that is simply ridiculous.

Sure, but there have been significant other non-theistic treatments of the PSR. — Janus

No, I think it is your own presuppositions that lead you to interpret it that way. When I speak about "the world" I mean the world as it is experienced, understood and known; which effectively is all the world for us. — Janus

Well, if you completely eschew any non-mental aspects of the PSR and treat it idealistically-epistemologically, then you end up with tautologies of the sort that (paraphrasing) "the condition for being an object of experience is to be capable of being an object of experience," and the like.

there isn't even a unique, rational choice to be made about what those brute facts should be. — SophistiCat

This seems to contradict your previous statement about "starting with the one idea that you cannot possibly deny". — Janus

I was not endorsing anthropic explanations as the most rational - I was playing an advocate in order to show that they are not obviously irrational (as some objectors reflexively react to them). If we were discussing the merits of anthropic explanations, I might criticize them as well (on the grounds of parsimony perhaps). So I still say that there cannot be a completely rational decision about the way we choose to structure our explanations. It will depend on the sort of question we are trying to answer and our epistemological preferences. The world does not dictate that decision to us - it constrains it at best; the world is not "rational" as such.

Of course we cannot explain absolutely everything, there will always be the questions about absolute origins and fundamentals. — Janus

Indeed. And we don't even have to be foundationalist in our explanations, but go for something more like a web of beliefs.

If we are theists we can claim the PSR applies to those as well; the rationality of reality is guaranteed by God. But if we are not theists then the real, considered in absolute terms, cannot be either rational or irrational; to say it is either would be a category error. The 'actualities' of origins and fundamentals, are, in principle, outside of human experience and understanding, except insofar as we can say that they provide the unknowable conditions for the possibility of anything at all; and in that sense we can say that they are sufficient reasons, for if they were not sufficient conditions there would not be anything at all. — Janus

Yes, for a theist the PSR makes a lot more sense, since there is an obvious locus of reason, as well as a direct connection between reason and the world (In the beginning there was the Word...) Although, depending on the variety of belief, a theist might still reject the principle.

"S knows that P" -> "S knows that S knows that P."
"S knows that S knows that P" -> "S knows that S knows that S knows that P"

This seems like such a basic point that I'm sure proponents of the KK principle have thought of it, but what's the reply? How does this not imply that, in order to know something, I have to know that I know that I know that I know... ad infinitum? And what would that mean? If it's supposed to be intelligible that I can know that I know something, then the whole regress should be intelligible, right? — Pneumenon

My feeling is that the problem is either solved through semantic collapse, i.e. "S knows that P" means exactly the same as "S knows that S knows that P" (similarly to how, say, "It is true that P" means exactly the same (?) as "It is true that it is true that P") - or else it cannot be solved and the KK principle is false. Which one it is will turn on the concept of knowledge used.

So, my conclusion is that the PSR does capture the phenomenology of human knowledge-seeking, insofar as we are never, generally speaking, satisfied with the current sufficiency of our knowledge and reasoning, and are constantly seeking to increase it. If all you want to claim against the PSR is that there can be no, for us, absolutely sufficient explanation, and that our enquiries don't necessarily need to proceed on the assumption that there is such an absolute explanation, then perhaps we have not been disagreeing so much after all. — Janus

No disagreement here, but, as I keep saying, this is too weak to even be called a Principle, and doesn't really sound like the PSR in Leibnitz's or Scholastic tradition, which, as I understand it, requires the world to be objectively "rational" through and through.

Also, the PSR does not require that there be a "unique, objective and comprehensive Reason for everything", but merely that nothing happens in our world without sufficient reason or cause. — Janus

Ah, but here you are making a much stronger statement. This is no longer just about our knowledge-seeking, isn't it?

This is where we diverge, I think. You seem to have a kind of Cartesian view which separates the subject from the world such that rationality could be 'merely in our heads", and that the world could somehow "be some way" that is radically different from the way we experience it. — Janus

Well, what would be the alternative? Remember, the very framing of this conversation presupposes, for good or ill, subjects and objects: things in the world and our explanations, reasons, causes, which are about those things.

I wouldn't call this a Cartesian turn, but quite the opposite, a somewhat Kantian or phenomenological turn that heralds the closing of the Cartesian gap between mind and world. — Janus

I meant "Cartesian" in its method: start with the one idea that you cannot possibly deny, put it at the center of your explanatory scheme.

And I totally agree; "why not this as at least one of the reasons"? That's what I alluded to earlier; there is no radical separation between us and the world, between our rationality and the 'way things are'. — Janus

I don't think you understood the point of my example, which was to show how, even in the most rationalistic projects of fundamental science, once we start pushing against the limits of our modeling, not only do we have to concede that there are brute facts, explanatory termini that admit no further explanation, but that there isn't even a unique, rational choice to be made about what those brute facts should be. Some may prefer to put just physical laws and constants at the foundation of the reductive scheme, while others may argue, not without reason, that those laws and constants can be further reduced/constrained if we take the existence of observers as one of the givens. (And if Apo was here, he would, of course, be pushing for other high-level constraints as yet another alternative set of brute facts.)