I asked you first. :) It was a sincere question — aletheist

I thought that my position was clear. JTB is not an operational definition of knowledge. While justified is operational, true is aspirational. When deciding whether some belief warrants the claim of knowledge, justification is the only criterion that needs to be met. We can't produce anything above and beyond justification that would signify truth. (Again, I am excluding the kinds of belief that don't fit the JTB model in the first place.)

No doubt every person has some beliefs that are justified yet false, which therefore do not qualify as genuine knowledge. Hence modesty seems to be the proper attitude about them. — aletheist

Most of us are on board with fallibilism. But that attitude ought to extend to pretty much all of our beliefs. When you single out one particular belief, surely you have more than this platitude in mind?

How do we distinguish justified belief from genuine knowledge? — aletheist

Well, how do we? If justification is insufficient to warrant the claim of knowledge, then what is? Super-duper justification?

Isn't Venter involved in "minimal genome"-type research (i.e. investigating what is the minimum number of genes an organism requires in order to sustain and propagate itself)? That line of research would seem to be at least tangentially relevant to OOL. — Arkady

Yes, this sounds like it could be relevant, but I confess I know very little about their research.

The justification warrants the belief, but not (by itself) the claim to knowledge. — aletheist

Oh but it does. What else could possibly warrant a claim of knowledge? (Other than the kind of knowledge that doesn't fit the JTB mold anyway, such as knowledge how.)

Just curious, what is your warrant for claiming that we know this? It is obviously a belief; and given certain presuppositions, it is justified; but what makes you so confident that it is true? — aletheist

That's a problem with the JTB definition of knowledge. You could ask the same question about anything we say we know. The answer, of course, is already contained in your question - the warrant is in the justification.

Great article, but it left me puzzled, not for the obvious reasons but rather why it did not mention anything about Synthetic Biology, and especially JC Venter. I understand that the people in the article you referenced are looking for the origin of life, how it could have happened and it sounds like it may be an emergent phenomena from what I read. I kept on waiting for the author to bring Venter's work his effort to create synthetic life, even if only in passing, seems like both searches ought to be related, but I don't know enough about it. So why, if you think there is a reason? — Cavacava

Why do you think Venter's work is relevant to the OOL research? In the classic Miller-Urey and similar experiments, researchers were trying to produce - not life, but precursor organics at least - under "natural" conditions that they thought were present on Earth when life began. Venter's team isn't trying to do anything of the sort. They are doing bioengineering using all the latest tools, materials and techniques.

And they aren't really producing life from scratch - there's rather too much hype about their results, impressive as they are. I suppose if someone did pull off such a feat - actually assembling a living organism from non-living components, as opposed to modifying and reassembling parts of living organisms - that would be a convincing argument against vitalism. But who takes vitalism seriously anyway? Not OOL researchers, for sure.

I'll repost this link to a BBC article that gives a popular overview of the history and the current state of the origin of life research:

The secret of how life on Earth began

It's interesting to note how the newly-fashionable anti-Islamism's efforts to villainize Muslims by tendentiously scrutinizing their holy texts parallel similar efforts from antisemites scrutinizing the Talmud. I wonder if the two groups have much of an intersection? I mean, there are, of course, plenty of people who are both antisemitic and anti-Muslim, but I am specifically interested in the amateur scholars who perform this sort of exercise.

Let's see if some rules help. It seems to me there are really just three ways to respond to rules:
1. agree with them
2. modify and improve them
3. demonstrate where they're wrong.

Of course one may also dislike them, but that's neither here nor there. — tim wood

Why? You have the unqualified "agree" option - why is there no "disagree" option?

Anyway, you don't have to start from scratch, you know. Truth

But it does seem like a good opportunity to bring up one of Paxton's big talking points: the self-explanations offered by fascists should be taken with a grain of salt. What they said isn't always in line with what they did (in fact, it usually wasn't.) — csalisbury

Were Mussolini's theories as quoted here all that far from the reality fascism?

"Such a conception of life makes Fascism the complete opposite of that doctrine, the base of the so-called scientific and Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history; according to which the history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various sodal groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production ... Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect. ... And above all Fascism denies that class war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society. These two fundamental concepts of Socialism being thus refuted. nothing is left of it but the sentimental aspiration-as old as humanity itselftowards a social convention in which the sorrows and sufferings of the humblest shall be alleviated." — StreetlightX

"The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. ... 'For us Fascists, the State is not merely a guardian, preoccupied solely with the duty of assuring the personal safety of the citizens; nor is it an organization with purely material aims, such as to guarantee a certain level of well-being and peaceful conditions... — StreetlightX

Ironically, that's almost spot-on Soviet-style socialism as it really existed (as opposed to the far-fetched communist and socialist theories). The "class warfare" as such was only a socialist feature at the outset. But historically, both socialism and fascism find some out-groups to terrorize and discriminate against (that's where mobilization comes in).

Is this statement justified by a utilitarian or a virtue ethics?

Mendel theorized that genes were the units of inheritance, but he wasn't able to observe them. That had to wait until the discovery of DNA.

Neptune was predicted based on irregularities of Uranus's orbit that could be explained by the existence of another planet.

And atoms were theorized by the ancient Greeks. It's only been in the last few decades that they've been seen, and even manipulated to produce a short animation. — Marchesk

You provide examples where theoretical entities are associated with some more-or-less concrete, sensible objects*. And that's how it should be: any theory, physical or metaphysical, ultimately has to connect with the sensible world. But not all theoretical entities have a direct correspondence with something you can (sort of) see and touch. What is energy? What is a field? What is a charge? What is a wave-function? These things don't seem like "things" at all. But they are concepts that are instrumental in building our theories, which ultimately do connect to reality.

* Atoms are a red herring here, since they weren't theorized by Democritus and his followers - theirs was a groundless metaphysical speculation that just happened to superficially resemble the atomic theory that was developed much later.

Your original example involved momentum and impulse. Well, as your own analysis showed, some of the entities involved have fairly obvious experiential correlates. The one non-obvious entity among them is force - that is probably what you should have zeroed in on. What is a force? Feynman has a nice discussion of it in his lectures, and he frames the question not unlike the way you did:

Let us ask, “What is the meaning of the physical laws of Newton, which we write as $F=ma$? What is the meaning of force, mass, and acceleration?” Well, we can intuitively sense the meaning of mass, and we can define acceleration if we know the meaning of position and time. We shall not discuss those meanings, but shall concentrate on the new concept of force. The answer is equally simple: “If a body is accelerating, then there is a force on it.” That is what Newton’s laws say, so the most precise and beautiful definition of force imaginable might simply be to say that force is the mass of an object times the acceleration. Suppose we have a law which says that the conservation of momentum is valid if the sum of all the external forces is zero; then the question arises, “What does it mean, that the sum of all the external forces is zero?” A pleasant way to define that statement would be: “When the total momentum is a constant, then the sum of the external forces is zero.” There must be something wrong with that, because it is just not saying anything new. If we have discovered a fundamental law, which asserts that the force is equal to the mass times the acceleration, and then define the force to be the mass times the acceleration, we have found out nothing. We could also define force to mean that a moving object with no force acting on it continues to move with constant velocity in a straight line. If we then observe an object not moving in a straight line with a constant velocity, we might say that there is a force on it. Now such things certainly cannot be the content of physics, because they are definitions going in a circle. The Newtonian statement above, however, seems to be a most precise definition of force, and one that appeals to the mathematician; nevertheless, it is completely useless, because no prediction whatsoever can be made from a definition. One might sit in an armchair all day long and define words at will, but to find out what happens when two balls push against each other, or when a weight is hung on a spring, is another matter altogether, because the way the bodies behave is something completely outside any choice of definitions. — The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol. I Ch. 12: Characteristics of Force

Where this all grounds out is observables, of course - whatever we can observe and measure. Everything else is a theory, a formalism to tie together the observations. Taking some isolated component of the formalism and asking what it really is makes no sense, at least to me. Do you know what it is you are asking for? What kind of an answer do you require?

Whatever, Wosret. It seems that you just aren't interested, which is fine, but you should just acknowledge that, instead of making tendentious statements. I am not saying that Skinner's behaviorism is the be all, end all of all psychology, but it's an influential enough theory to take it seriously.

By the way, no one was "tricking" the birds - the pigeons were fooling themselves all on their own. That was the whole point of the experimental setup: rewards were not correlated to pigeons' behavior in order to reinforce their "superstitions". The setup played the role of blind forces of nature that didn't care about pigeons' little tricks.

According to classic behaviorist theory, conditioned behavior needs reinforcement, otherwise it is gradually extinguished. Skinner's experiment demonstrated the extinction of pigeons' "superstitious" ticks when the regular stimulus of starvation and feeding that produced them was interrupted. When the stimulus was resumed at a later time, the birds often picked up different superstitions.

It demonstrates a basic psychological mechanism that at least partly accounts for the persistence of superstitions (despite it being fairly easy to disprove them with careful observation): confirmation bias, as we like to call it (described in more detail in Skinner's and other behaviourists' theories).

Things are more complicated with humans, I am sure (and probably with animals as well), but that mechanism is still a good first approximation.

There is a broader historical sense of superstition as all types of non-rational, magical-like beliefs - often including religious beliefs that we do not share and do not particularly respect.

There are also more private superstitions that Ann mentioned in the OP, which I would define as personal causal beliefs that are deemed to be both wrong and irrational.

"The idea of trying to explain a [religious] practice seems wrong to me"
"It will never be plausible to say that mankind does all that out of sheer stupidity"
"Error arises only when magic is interpreted scientifically" — Cavacava

I don't agree that it is wrong to explain magical, superstitious and even religious behavior scientifically. Frazer is a dubious and outdated source, but psychology and anthropology (and, more controversially, evo biology and neuroscience) have produced some interesting insights.

Here is a classic Skinner work on the superstitious behavior in... pigeons! (Conducted long before Witty issued his comments.):

In the Summer of 1947, renowned psychiatrist Skinner published his study on a group of pigeons that showed even animals are susceptible to the human condition that is superstition.

Skinner conducted his research on a group of hungry pigeons whose body weights had been reduced to 75% of their normal weight when well-fed. For a few minutes each day, a mechanism fed the birds at regular intervals. What observers of the pigeons found showed the birds developing superstitious behaviour, believing that by acting in a particular way, or committing a certain action, food would arrive.

By the end of the study, three quarters of the birds had become superstitious. One pigeon, in pursuit of food, believed that by turning around in the cage twice or three times between being fed, but not just in any direction; the bird learnt to turn anti-clockwise and appeared to believe that this would mean it being fed. Now, it's easy to dismiss such behaviour as normal - a bird in a cage might be expected to exercise a little. But the other birds developed unique supertitious behaviours in an attempt to gain a meal. Other behaviors the observers discovered include what they described as a 'pendulum' movement of the head, and a regular nodding movement in another bird. — Psychologist World

(Full paper here.)

There is either a platypus in my pocket or not, so there's a 50% chance that I have a platypus in my pocket. Seems kind of high odds there. — Hanover

Let me help you out here. There is either a platypus, a piece of lint, or nothing in your pocket. It's equal odds (of course), but there's now only a 33% chance of there being a platypus in your pocket. Better?

If you are thinking about something along the lines of jumping from world to world, like in Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife and various other books and films, that's the realm of fantasy fiction. The real-world quantum mechanics is both more complicated (you can't really grasp it without those "fundamentals" in place) and more mundane.

Strictly speaking, you don't need mathematics as we have it in order to do philosophy. However, in its essence, mathematics is a systematic and disciplined approach to producing and thinking about structures and relationships, and as such its relevance to any reasoning is obvious. Moreover, the centuries of mathematical work have already produced a rich toolbox of structures, methods and insights, and it would be foolish not to use it.

(Ignoring apo's derail to address the OP quote)

We can question the is-ought gap by a couple of examples:

1.) Everything I say is true.
2.) I say having children is wrong.
3.) Therefore, having children is wrong. — darthbarracuda

This looks like a cheap trick, and it is. Here is an even simpler example:

1. The proposition "having children is wrong" is true.
2. Therefore, having children is wrong.

As in the original, the premise is ostensibly non-moral: the original premises both assert some facts about me, in my example the premise asserts a fact about some proposition. But of course, in my example disquotation yields a moral premise, and similarly, in the original example dereferencing yields the same moral premise. Indeed, we couldn't validly obtain the conclusion in either example if disquotation/dereferencing was not implied!

So the claim that by this sort of argument you can get a moral conclusion from non-moral premises is not true.

all right, there is something to the limited capacity that each of us has for moral concerns; however, I think that more importantly, moral imperatives are often in tension with each other (e.g. do not harm vs. punish).

Caring is not a zero-sum game.

Behavioral theories of mind are supposed to explain behavior. Panpsychism is supposed to explain something else - "the hard problem of consciousness," as alluded to by Moliere.

To my mind, there are two open questions here (that are probably related to each other): one is whether there is anything to explain (i.e. whether "the hard problem" is really a problem), and the other whether panpsychism constitutes an explanation (not just good or best explanation, but any explanation at all) - might it not be a kind of dormitive virtue.

No, no, no. I wasn't looking for "the right way to reason things out." My question was not about life, the universe, and everything. I asked a specific, contextual question about the topic of discussion. But those who started and took part in the discussion have drifted off, so...

You were doing well until the last paragraph. Not only does it not follow from the reasoning that preceded it, it goes directly against it! If you concluded that the coin was biased towards heads, then you should bet on heads, not on tails.

If I recall correctly, Carl Sagan contributed to some research on meteoritic dust accretion. He is mostly remembered for being a great science popularizer and a sort of generalist visionary, but he actually did some good down-to-earth (as it were) science as well.

Although it seems to me that if the probability of getting heads or tails is really 50%, then if we have a bunch of one side in a row, that should increase the odds of getting the other side on a subsequent throw. Why am I thinking this? Well, for the 50% to have any real significance, it needs to be referring to what happens over a series of throws, where the more throws there are, the closer the data set gets to 50% for either side. Otherwise, how in the world would we be arriving at the 50% figure in th first place? — Terrapin Station

Probabilities are single-case, or nothing

But even if you do not agree with that view, you are still committing a fallacy in attributing a causal significance to that 50% probability. How did we arrive at the 50% figure in the first place? From the following assumptions:

• There are two possible outcomes,
• Trials are independent,
• On each trial there is no more reason to expect one outcome than the other.

Assuming a causal influence of preceding trials on subsequent trials would go directly against those assumptions.

Solving equations has nothing to do with positing real ontological entities. — Terrapin Station

That is a thoughtless and irrelevant retort. The question that started this line of discussion was whether black holes were "invented" in order to accommodate some observations that, as you said, did not fit existing gravitational models. That is exactly backwards. The observations that we now attribute to black holes fit our gravitational models like a glove.

That they're consistent with GR doesn't make them a prediction of GR. We invented them so that they'd be consistent with GR, otherwise we'd need to retool our gravitational theory. — Terrapin Station

We "invented" them only in the same sense that we "invent" solutions to equations. Black holes are what we can expect to see, given GR. And what we do see is in close agreement with what we expect to see. So whatever semantic point you are trying to score, it is irrelevant. Black hole physics is not an ad hoc addition to our gravitational models, as you implied.

What you didn't get is — quine

...pretty much everything. The thing is that your argument is so simple structurally that it is either trivial or the real meat of the argument needs some unpacking.

The structure and apparent motion of stars doesn't match what we're expecting given our gravitational model. Hence the need to invent black holes. — Terrapin Station

No. Black holes are a generic prediction of General Relativity. If GR is our gravitational model, then black holes are part of the package.

lexical concepts — quine

You'll need to explain what you mean by that.

I don't get it. Don't "composed" concepts have structure? If not, then I don't understand what you mean by having structure.

I was at first confused by your talk about the brain, until I realized that you meant something like rational deliberation, as opposed to intuition/subconscious. OK, so rationality vs. intuition, I get it. But, except for the rather cryptic conclusion, I don't see how this connects with objective vs. subjective morality. More importantly, I don't see how this connects to the OP question.

I should make it clear, I wasn't asking for someone to just make up something based on any associations evoked by the words "objective"/"subjective". The notions of objective vs. subjective morality are commonly invoked in discussions of morality everywhere from academic works to public speeches to forum discussions. People who use these terms seem to mean something specific by them - or at least they think they do. So I want to understand what it is that the OP and those here who argued for or against "objective morality" meant by that.

The only thing that's definitely there is numbers from our instruments that don't match what we're expecting given our current gravitational models. — Terrapin Station

They match what we're expecting given our current gravitational models to a high degree of accuracy.

Would anyone actually take a crack at explaining what "objective meaning" or "objective morals" are? It's not a trivial question.

For meaning and morals to just pop out of subjectivity seems a bit queer. — intrapersona

Interestingly, one of the classic arguments for the so-called error theory of morality (which perforce denies that moral truths can be objective, since it rejects any moral truths), advanced by Mackie, is known as "the argument from queerness." It basically says that mind-independent immanent moral properties would be metaphysically queer and epistemically inaccessible without some equally queer faculties for perceiving those properties.

Murder is unethical for a civilian, but is ethical for a soldier. Cutting some one open is unethical for most of us, but not for a surgeon. Similarly, in a given situation, lying to a dying person or a child can be merciful, while telling the truth may be cruel. How can morality not be subjective to the person, and to the situation? Compassion should be better parameter of morality than any other. — Ashwin Poonawala

Of course moral prescriptions often come with some qualifications. That's not what is usually meant by moral subjectivity (although what exactly is meant is rather hard to tease out, as I mentioned above).

Whether GR is accurate or not doesn't change the astronomical data. There is something there. Our understanding of it might be inaccurate, but that doesn't change the data. — Marchesk

It does change whether what we are seeing is a black hole, because a "black hole" is not a theory-free observation, it is a theoretical entity that happens to fit observations in the context of modern physics and astronomy. That is not to say that there is something particularly suspect about black holes: we could say the same about just about anything: atoms, eclipses, electrical currents, etc.

The only really suspect thing about black holes is the theoretically-predicted singularity at their center - many consider this to be problematic as such, and especially so if we assume that quantum mechanics is valid at the same time.

? — WhiskeyWhiskers

Yeah, this is almost beautiful, isn't it? I've heard quite a few anti-AGW "arguments", but I suppose it takes a philosophy fan to take it to such a surreal level of idiocy.

I think some people are paralyzed by the awfulness of what the absence of cheap abundant oil, coal, electricity, transportation, etc. mean. It means an end to life as we know it. Some of those people are in positions of national power. If they aren't paralyzed, they may be too shocked to deal with it. — Bitter Crank

I think that the unwillingness to recognize and act upon the issues raised by climate change and natural resource exhaustion is more commonly caused by indifference than by shock and paralysis.

Contrary to common denialist conspiracies, governments hate to do anything that doesn't serve some immediate, tangible purpose, preferably with a turnaround within one or two election cycles. The only thing that would motivate them to expend limited resources and manpower on an issue that will be someone else's problem some time in an indefinite future is a strong public demand for action. (And that's democratic governments - undemocratic ones don't much care about anything other than staying in power, stuffing their pockets, and perhaps stroking their egos with grandiose projects; public welfare has little correlation with those goals.)

As for the common folk, especially of the conservative-libertarian temperament, their primary motivation tends to be self-interest. The fate of future generations is too abstract a concern. What have future generations ever done for me? Nothing, so fuck them. They want to take all they can for themselves, and they want it now. They will only sacrifice their wealth and comfort under compulsion, and future generations are not around to compel anyone.

Of course, put starkly like this, these are not very PC positions, and in any case, most people don't reason them out. Instead, these implicit positions motivate their reasoning about ostensibly scientific, factual matters. So we get a lot of hedging about how science is uncertain and evidence is insufficient.