I don't know what is a volatile and unbounded set. Can you provide some examples so I can understand what you're saying? — fishfry

Yes, any programmer's use of an infinite FOR loop. We all know in practice that infinite loops are, in a pragmatic sense, merely finite loops whose termination condition isn't specified by the program. In other words, the termination of the algorithm isn't internally constructive from the point of view of the program itself.

Volatile is not a term of art in math at all. And its use in C programming is very specific as I think we agree. It just tells the compiler not to optimize the variable. — fishfry

Right, i'm am not so much referring to compiler mechanics, as to the logic of volatile types. Programmers use a richer notion of logic than is used by traditional set theory that equivocates internally constructed sets with externally supplied sets. The consequence of this is mistake is the kludge known as the Axiom of choice that allows the specification of arbitrary unbounded sets, but only for unbounded sets, effectively conflating arbitrariness with unboundedness [/quote]

The integers are unbounded because you can't draw a finite circle around them all. The unit interval is bounded since all its elements are within 1 unit of each other. Yet the unit interval has far larger cardinality than the integers. So I am not sure what you're trying to get at. — fishfry

Whenever we refer to an integer, we are either referring to a integer which we ourselves have or will construct using an algorithm in our possession, or we are referring to an arbitrary integer that is to be delivered to us by some external source. Constructivists make the mistake of conflating existential quantification with construction. It is a mistake, because, say, we cannot run society on software that uses only predictably terminating bounded for loops. Platonists on the other hand, while rightly insisting that non-constructed sets are indispensable in practice, wrongly locate the source of that indispensibility to a priori notions of existence.

In C programming, the equivalent symbol to infinity is the volatile keyword.
— sime

Jeez that's not true. A volatile variable is one that is, for example, mapped to an external data source. Declaring a variable volatile tells the compiler that it can't depend on nearby code statements in order to optimize the variable. — fishfry

sorry, I should have said infinity is equivalent to volatile and unbounded. I am saying volatile and unbounded is equivalent to the specification of an infinite set, considered as extension, in cases where the infinite set is not directly defined in terms of a constructive algorithm.

This simply has nothing at all to do with transfinite ordinals and cardinals as understood in math. It's apples and spark plugs.

it also fails to discriminate sets which are volatile and bounded from sets which are volatile and unbounded.
— sime

This has no referent in math. I am not sure where you are getting these notions. — fishfry

Likewise, Transfinite ordinals divide into those which are specified constructively as tree-growing algorithms and those which denote unspecified trees to be supplied by the environment, whether bounded or unbounded.

Finitism overlooks the fact that the practical use of 'infinity' is merely to denote an unspecified unbounded number. Consequently, If infinity wasn't part of mathematics, then mathematics could not be used by science to describe current physical laws, rather it would only document previously verified event occurrences.

In C programming, the equivalent symbol to infinity is the volatile keyword. When a C program declares a volatile object, say "volatile int myInteger" , the program is declaring that the value of "myInteger" isn't specified by either the programmer or the program itself, but that the value will be supplied later at an unspecified time by the environment. The specification of an 'infinite' number of iterations in a computer program, say while(true) {..}, is therefore equivalent to writing while(volatile int myInteger){....}.

Unfortunately, set theory and logic do not possess an equivalent concept. The closest axioms they possess is the Axiom of Choice, but this axiom is flawed because it is considered to be either accepted or rejected universally across all sets, and it also fails to discriminate sets which are volatile and bounded from sets which are volatile and unbounded. Consequently the status of the axiom of choice remains confusing and controversial.

In my opinion, the historical cause of debates over the existence of infinity is the result of logicians failing to recognise that the semantics of logic and maths isn't fully a priori.

In my opinion, Wittgenstein wanted to use the word "grammar" to refer to the pre-theoretical, intuitive, ineffable and phenomenological aspects of meaning - but found himself unable to do so, due to

i) the common usage of the word "grammar" to refer to the conventions of linguistic protocol.

ii) The paradox that some form of linguistic protocol must be used if grammatical sentiment is to be communicated - which leads to verbal contradictions in cases where we say that a particular word or set of words has meaning but cannot be given a verbal definition.

Am i right in suspecting that Speculative realism is continental-philosophy's muddled attempt at analytic philosophy?

Turn the question around: Is it right for humans to allow other animals to commit cannibalism?

Suppose that we can synthetically mass-produce artificial meat. Then in order to minimize earthly suffering, then ideally, shouldn't we enforce ALL carnivores within the animal kingdom to eat synthetic meat only and prevent them from killing for food?

What is the justification for not extending human ethics into the rest of the animal kingdom? Is it merely a matter of pragmatism?

The idea of the Turing test involves interaction between two open systems. This implies that the dispute over the significance of the Turing test is independent of the dispute as to whether humans or machines are automata.

For whether or not a human or machine is considered to be an automaton depends upon one's definition of their conceptual boundaries across space an time. Is a machine that suffers an internal fault the same machine running the same program? Are sensory inputs considered to be part of the machine's operation? etc. etc.

There are two ways to interpret the Turing test, namely the realist/cartesian interpretation and the anti-realist/non-cartesian interpretation.

The public usually understands the Turing test epistemically according to the realist interpretation, since they normally by cultural default understand consciousness in a cartesian fashion as referring to intrinsic functional semantics of the brain. They consequently view the Turing test as a fallible appearance test of a machine's internal functional properties, properties that exist independently of appearances to the contrary, say if the Turing test gave a false-negative.

The less popular alternative view, that appeared to be the view of Wittgenstein, is the anti-realist, non-cartesian interpretation of the Turing Test, whereby it is understood that if a machine passes our consciousness test, then the machine is conscious by definition. In other words, a Turing test isn't so much a test for Turing-test independent consciousness, rather the Turing test articulates the visible circumstances in which we say that a thing is conscious or not conscious.

The critical ontological difference of this latter view, is that the functional semantics of a brain or machine are understood holistically as being irreducible to the brain or machine in and of themselves. As Wittgenstein hinted in PI, A game of chess is only recognized as a game of chess when embedded within a relevant culture. Therefore Wittgenstein would likely have sided with Searle and rejected Dennett's "China Brain"; for while the population of china might be able to use semaphore to simulate the brain's internal organisation, the surrounding context isn't present to attribute intentionality.


As for the question you actually asked, i believe the notion of free-will is to a large extent orthogonal to understandings of the Turing test.

The following is a link to some similar ideas to mine, although not entirely similar, but close.

https://www.academia.edu/7298912/Hinge_Propositions_and_the_Logical_Exclusion_of_Doubt — Sam26

That is pretty close to what i thought you were saying. I wasn't questioning your views, just pointing to directions of further discussion.

My conclusion based on these ideas is that many bedrock beliefs or hinge-propositions are causally formed, that is, there is a causal connection between the reality around us, our sensory experiences, and our mind. This, it seems to me, is what triggers the belief. — Sam26

Supposing a speaker, perhaps a schizophrenic, behaved in a certain fashion while talking in a contradictory manner about his actions (much like a politician). Whereabouts is the contradiction between his actions and his words? Is it in the speaker's mind? or does the contradiction purely concern linguistic convention, with any confusion being solely in the mind of the listener as a result of misinterpreting the speaker?

Supposing a speaker incorrectly guesses the lottery numbers. What is the difference between saying "the speaker's guess about the lottery outcome was wrong" versus saying "the speaker's 'guess' was correct, for he didn't really intend to win the lottery, for his report was in fact a causal response to his environment and we mistook his words for a prediction" ?

The problem is, there aren't any conceivable means for distinguishing the content of a bedrock belief from the content of a verbal belief apart from appeals to linguistic convention. And if beliefs, whether bedrock or verbal, are causal responses, then they cannot be objectively falsified, since behavioral goals are also interpretable in terms of causal responses to immanent environmental conditions.

In constructive logic, the logical rule for introducing existential quantification replaces a proposition that directly refers to a particular, say "My cat is named 'Zeus' ", with a similar proposition that is non-referring, e.g "There exists a cat named Zeus'". Conversely, constructive logic guarantees that an existential quantifier can always be replaced by a reference to a particular bearing the relevant properties.

By constructive logic, "X exists" doesn't refer to a spiritual essence of a particular to which one is presently acquainted,i.e. uniqueness, but merely expresses the ability to locate or to create at least one object possessing the observational properties described by the predicate 'X'.

So the meaning of "Elvis Presley does not exist", "Unicorns don't exist", and so on, without further assumptions, merely expresses the inability to create or to find objects described by the respective predicates.

The difficulty here, is to reconcile the fact that we can talk about unicorns whilst at the same time claiming that we cannot exhibit them. This can be reconciled by first giving unicorns a constructive definition within a hypothetical universe of discourse in which unicorns can be said to exist according to our definitions, and then afterwards asserting that such a constructive definition is inapplicable within our actual universe.

In other words, the non-existence of an object is understood to refer to a constructed object within one universe, that has no equivalently constructed partner within another universe, thereby making non-existence a relation between two universes.

Check out the Rorty clip above. The relativity of 'existence' thesis renders 'things in their own right' meaningless i.e. Kant's 'inaccessihle noumena' was abondoned by later phenomenologists as a useless concept. — fresco

Given that Existence was one of Kant's modal categories of understanding, perhaps Kant was arguing for your very position, namely that existence isn't 'noumenal' i.e. it is an expression of human judgement rather than an assertion of an absolute property.

In that case, it sounds like you are more interested in the policy optimization of Decision processes. Such problems can be implicitly solved via adaptive sampling, i.e. reinforcement learning, of action policies, state transitions and rewards, assuming they caneach be respectively sampled. If the utility function as a function of state, is known explicitly, it might even possible to analytically derive an agent's optimal policy, assuming linearity, Markovian dynamics, observability of states and actions, etc.

And this. Why must logic and maths be either discovered, or invented. Why not both? — Banno

The problem is, set theory fails to explicitly distinguish 'constructed sets' that correspond to an algorithm known to the logician, from 'discovered sets' encountered externally in the real world, but whose construction is unspecified.

If Set Theory were to insist that all sets can be constructed by an algorithm, then Set theory would also insist that nature is describable by an algorithm, i.e. that a Theory of Everything exists. Yet it cannot ever be known if such a Theory of Everything exists:

Take the example of a vending machine that dispenses a set of items. Should it be the job of set theory to insist that every vending machine has a mechanical implementation, whether or not we know of it's inner workings? Should Set theory automatically assume that every can of coke within the vending machine has a distinct identity before it is dispensed?

Standard non-constructive set theory has a means of specifying an "unspecified set", such as that produced by a mysterious vending machine, namely the Axiom of Choice. But ironically the name of the axiom is a misnomer, because the Axiom of Choice is only useful in mysterious situations where we cannot specify a choice procedure.

I think you're referring to modal logic, i.e. to possibility.

Syntactically, modal logic looks like the inverse of deduction, due to the fact that deduction allows different premises to lead to the same conclusion.

yes, we appeal to external witnesses, such as the operations of computers, or to the opinions of others, in order to conform whether or not our reasoning is tautologous. But this external checking not only confirms whether or not our reasoning is in accordance with our logical definitions, but it also constitutes part of the very meaning of our logical definitions. For the meaning of "ideal" logic must ultimately be witnessed by practical state of affairs, if it is to have public meaning.

So in my opinion, logical necessity is empirically contingent, although not contingent upon the testimony of any particular external witness.

"Logic doesn't require facts" - Only when our process of deduction isn't in question.

Remember, we usually need to verify our proofs via appealing to external facts, e.g. a calculator.

Presumably you mean formal logic (since the question is logical in its very nature). Formal logic is in an identity crisis imo, due it's failure to explicitly distinguish "necessary" objects that are constructed according to convention and are hence fully specified, from objects encountered in nature that are vague and unspecified.

For example, I can construct a sequence of cakes from a bunch of ingredients by iterating a recipe in my possession. But I can also obtain an identical sequence of cakes by repeatedly pressing a button on a vending machine. Neither logic nor set theory take care to distinguish these two sets, because the process of construction is viewed as being either irrelevant to, or identical to, the meaning of "existence".

Consequently a hideous "bugfix" called "the axiom of choice" was invented in order to accommodate "non-specified" entities, causing mass confusion and yielding ridiculous implications in failing to treat sets and their construction on a case by case basis.

Yes, as I understand it, verbal knowledge - the sort of knowledge discussed by epistemologists, is trivial and irrelevant to Gettier problems, for verbal knowledge must, at least under a naturalistic understanding of the mind, be reducible to linguistic convention.

For example, suppose Bob insists "The Earth is flat" and Alice is convinced that the opposite is true.
Then Bob and Alice aren't referring to the same thing. For if they were both referring to the same thing, then they wouldn't be in disagreement.

Rather, Bob and Alice are separately expressing to one another their own observations, goals and behavioral dispositions in a jointly incompatible way with respect to their shared language. Their conversational disagreement is only the result of each of them attempting to enforce their semantics on one another - and not just verbal semantics but behavioral as well; For example, perhaps Bob, in order to maintain his assertion that the earth is flat, refuses to circumnavigate the earth. His personal refusal to circumnavigate the earth would be part of his meaning of "the earth is flat".

On the other hand, the non-verbal practical knowledge of a solitary person, comprising of his actions in his personal pursuit of a goal, is where the Gettier problem has relevance. For here, linguistic convention matters not, while it is generally important to an individual that he can trust his watch, which necessitates a concept of practical-knowledge justification.

In PI Wittgenstein examines "Moore's Paradox", namely the sentence "It is raining, but I believe that it is not raining" and as I recall he concludes, in contrast to moore, that the sentence does indeed have sense when spoken about oneself in the present, namely as a situation in which one comes to realize that one's verbally expressed beliefs are in contradiction with one's actual behavior.

So the sentence "It is raining, but I know that it is not raining" also makes sense, when one is verbally certain about one's beliefs but comes to question one's behavioural "bedrock". So philosophers shouldn't equate behaviorally implied beliefs with verbally expressed beliefs.

Ironically, lucid dreamers use the presence of their dream hands within a dream as a cue to detect that they are dreaming. Said in this dream situation, is the sentence "I know I have hands" a hinge proposition or an epistemological claim? If a dreamer insisted the former they would fail the reality check and remain non-lucid.

Name and Sam is not part of the backdrop of non-linguistic reality, but a hand is part of the backdrop. — Sam26

The problem of course, is that natural language is it's own meta-language; it is therefore incapable of expressing a distinction between the publicly linguistic and the privately non-linguistic. This is why, contra-Wittgenstein, I think natural language is inappropriate for discussing philosophy. What you need is a special notation for signifying your pretheoretic and private sense of "hand".

What is it about realism that you think commits it to believing these "mysteriously lie elsewhere"? — Isaac

By realism I mean the idea that the meaning or truth-makers of a proposition are fully transcendent of the process of it's verification. For instance, take Hooke's Law.

The realist is the person who thinks "The elastic deformation of this spring is governed by Hooke's Law"

The anti-realist is the person who thinks "The elastic deformation of this spring is part of the definition of Hooke's Law"

Consider all that happens when teaching a physical law:

i) We write a statement which expresses a physical law.
ii) We demonstrate the meaning of the written statement by performing an experiment.
iii) We summarize the result of our demonstration: "Performing action U in state A resulted in state B, in accordance with the law"

According to realism, we've demonstrated the truth or coherence of the law as well as the meaning of the written statement, but the meaning, agency and whereabouts of the law itself mysteriously lie elsewhere.

In contrast, according to anti-realism our demonstration is part of the very meaning of the physical law. That is to say, the physical law is in part an anthropological description of what physicists do in certain situations to achieve a sense of coherence.

Of course, the anti-realist shouldn't forget the role and responsibility of the environment in the truth of experimental outcomes, that is to say the construction of such outcomes. The difference is, the anti-realist includes the very actions, perceptions and mentation of the physicist as part of the very definition of the physical law he is verifying.

All you have is an intuition that you call your "future self", an intuition which you currently experience and which is therefore a part of your immediate present. So planning to avoid opiate withdrawal is rational in the present in order to satisfy your present intuition called "future self".

Conversely, suppose that you are presently benefiting from a sense of well-being that you attribute to giving up opiates many months ago. All you have is a present intuition called "my past self giving up opiates", an intuition which is again part of your immediate present.

I think of myself this way:

Yesterday, any notion I had of 'tomorrow', including of my "tomorrow's self", in fact referred to yesterday and only to yesterday, since today didn't exist yesterday.

Compare the following statements

A: "Such and such is consciousness"
B: "I can relate to such and such".

Notice that nobody disagrees with you whenever you use B in a situation, because they tend to view B as an assertion you are making about yourself, rather than an assertion you are making about 'such and such' in itself.

On the other hand, whenever you say A in a situation, people normally interpret it to be an objective assertion you are making about 'such and such' in itself, regardless of whatever personal feelings and intuitions you harbor towards such and such.

In my opinion, this common realist belief that A and B refer to different things, which is itself a consequence of assuming an ontological distinction between subject and object, is the root cause of philosophical skepticism about the existence of other minds.

What if a buyer of the bottle believed 100% in the curse, but had a 'non-standard' understanding of "eternity", whereby eternal hell was understood to eventually end?

The natural concept of depression isn't descriptive of the state of the individual per-se, but of the individual's behavioral relationship to society. That is to say, the natural concept of depression is holistically irreducible to the individuals themselves.

On the other hand, the medical concept of depression is merely a description of the neuro-anatomical correlates of individuals who tend to be judged by society as being depressed in the natural sense. Consequently, a medical diagnosis of medical depression is neither necessary nor sufficient for establishing a diagnosis of natural depression.

The natural concept of depression should be compared to the legal concept of guilt. In both cases, judgements are sought for political reasons, and hence both concepts are inherently political. In being political, the outcome of such judgements often refer more to the state and needs of society than to the state and needs of the individual.

When a Christian or a person of another theistic religion says that their God exists, the truth is that they are saying this because they believe that God(s) exists. Regardless of how sure they claim to be or what "evidence" they give, the fact is that is simply what they believe, because no one knows if any God(s) exist, which is the exact reason why no evidence has been provided for the existence of any God(s). I personally do not have an opinion either way regarding God(s) or their presence, so I guess you could call me agnostic, but I am simply pointing out that no one knows if God(s) exists. If Christians actually knew that their God exists, then they could easily provide irrefutable evidence and there would not constantly be disputes by atheists asking for said evidence. I'm not arguing for atheists or theists, I'm simply saying that theists don't actually know if God does or does not exist, and therefore they should not claim to know this or try to give atheists reasons why God(s) does exists as opposed to simply accepting that they don't know if God exists. — Maureen

It isn't as simple as that, because the debate isn't purely an epistemic dispute over the possibility of theological knowledge. Rather, the debate between atheists and Christians is to a large extent a debate over the very meaning of evidence, god, and their interrelation.

There will be theists, the immanentists, who will say that one's immediate experience is all the proof one needs of gods existence, effectively eliminating the concept of evidence by identifying experience itself with divine presence. And on the other extreme there will be atheists who insist that the evidence for god is zero in every possible world, effectively eliminating the relevance of experience to the concept of god, leaving the idea of god empty. Both of these positions constitute 100% certainty in their respective beliefs.

The key is to recognize that their definitions of god are incompatible and that they are talking past each other in incommensurable dialects.

I suggest that to understand what a person means by "god", you must ask them to describe the experiences they are prepared to accept as constituting "god's" existence. After hearing the person's answers, is there anything more to discuss?

Californian houses can in fact metamorphose into flowers; by digesting themselves with fire to produce a large quantity of heat that can germinate flower-seeds within the house, which are then fertilized by the ash.

In the mathematical subject of topology, it is joked that donuts are coffee mugs and cows are footballs; because their shapes can be morphed into one another without the cutting or gluing of substance.

Likewise there is a similar geometric sense, albeit involving cutting and gluing, in which a "house" could morph into "flowers" or even be regarded as equivalent.

The author is possibly conflating natural language semantics with formal semantics. Any formal definition of transforming type A into type B requires a notion of similarity, which in turn requires that A and B can be projected into a common conceptual space.

As i see it, the notions of linguistic reference, causation and rigid-designation are part of an irreducible triad, in that each of these concepts cannot be understood without understanding the other two concepts. Therefore, whilst the concepts of linguistic reference, causation and rigid designation have practical validity in real-world application, they cannot be meaningfully used by philosophers to explicate one another, nor can they be used to justify epistemological foundations, due to vicious circularity.

Going back to the discussion, note that the two situations you described are not symmetrical. We have a reasonable well-developed semantic theory for declarative sentences (say, Montague grammar and extensions thereof). But we don't have a well-developed semantic theory for questions (and other "moods") that is independent of truth condition semantics, or of declaratives more generally. So we may hope to extend our analyses of declarative sentences to other types of sentences, but there is little hope of going in the reverse direction, since we don't even know where to start in that case. That's why we try to understand questions in terms of "answerhood" conditions, whereas no one (that I know of!) has tried to formulate a semantics for declarative sentences in terms of "questionhood" conditions. — Nagase

To my way of thinking, the meaning of a question is trivial by way of causation; a question refers to whatever answer the questioner finds acceptable. And if the questioner comes to later reject the answer he previously accepted, this is a situation in which the semantics of the questioner's question has changed - to referring to whatever new answer the questioner is now prepared to accept.

By this trivial cause-and-effect account, I don't see a hard distinction between questions and answers.

Suppose "pi" defines the perfect circle. Do you think that striving to resolve the exact mathematical value of pi would be a case of striving after the ideal? We all think that pi has no end, and to prove that it has no end is a fruitless task, like proving infinite has no end. But what if someone found the end? — Metaphysician Undercover

When writing pi as 3.14159... the dots "..." do not abbreviate the numeric result of an algorithm, rather the dots express that pi is a sequence generating algorithm, as opposed to referring to a particular numeric result of using such an algorithm. Hence "pi has no end" is true in referring to a sequence generating process.

All that said, Wittgenstein wrote remarks on several occasions that indicated his recognition of a theological sense in which mathematicians like Georg Cantor thought of the infinite cardinal numbers as representing platonistic "completed " infinities; namely in Wittgenstein's acknowledgement of the "giddy feelings" that accompany thinking about set-theory from the platonistic perspective, and that have psychologically motivated it's development. Wittgenstein, while clearly recognising this theological motivation and use of mathematics, forewarned that it led to the unnecessary development of confusing and over-complicated formalisms of logic that were misleading when it came to the practical application of logic and mathematics.

Isn't the Hippocratic oath and the entire practice of medicine a political practice? Accusations that the practice of clinical psychology is political therefore require nuance and elaboration. The very ethical notion of "harm" is relative to metaphysical ideas about the self, the state and personal mortality. In a world in which everyone rejected the idea of personal mortality and prioritized the health of the state, a painless suicide wouldn't necessarily be recognized as harm.

If the practice of clinical psychology was politically "neutral", psychologists would able to prescribe financial gifts, holiday cruises and supermodel escorts as remedies for treating depressed patients, as opposed to prescribing them "numbing" medications and talk therapies ....but this runs up against society's need to prioritize it's finite resources. So there cannot be a politically neutral practice of psychology.

The notions of mental illness, diagnosis and treatment, are better understood holistically from a utilitarian perspective. It is never the lone individual who is diagnosed and treated for a mental illness, but the individual as part of a wider cross-section of society whose broader interests are often in conflict with the individual. The particular interests of the psychology profession are but one component of this greater good.

Consider the game Cluedo. Who killed Dr Black?

- The "fact" as to the identity of the murderer refers, by convention, to a single name within the envelope in the middle of the board.

- The fact is constructed to be a hidden element of a finite set of suspects that is also decided by convention and known a priori to all players.

-The fact is decidable within finite time.

-At any time during play, a player's belief-space consists of the finite set of cards he knows of, but has not so far personally witnessed during this game.

So in this game, there is a clear convention for distinguishing epistemology from metaphysics, that is to say, for distinguishing 'belief' from 'fact'. The question the OP raises, as i understand it, concerns the extent to which the Cluedo model of truth applies in the real world.

Consider for example, what if two names were placed inside the envelope? Does this modified game denote epistemological uncertainty, or metaphysical ambiguity as to the culprit? Doesn't the answer to this question depend upon whether a second game will be played as a decider?

the practice of psychiatry isn't politically neutral, either on the side of the patient who requests a diagnosis due to failing to conform to the social values of modern society
— sime
It sounds like your concern about psychiatry relates to its practice in the criminal justice system, where the subject is not the doctor's client. That will always be problematic, just as it is with forensic pathologists and police surgeons.

But we can't avoid having that involvement, can we? What would be your preferred model for dealing with someone that is alleged to have committed a brutal crime and who pleads insanity or is suspected to be suffering from severe mental illness? — andrewk

If we accept that individuals are not self-causing agents, and therefore if we understand the concept of guilt pragmatically, in other words we define a person's guilt in terms of the social benefits of sentencing the individual, then we certainly need much more than mere analysis of the subject's brain, and in many instances the status of the subject's brain is irrelevant.

And exactly the same logic applies when diagnosing the average depression.

If psychiatry is a science which t accepts that individuals are not self-causing agents, then I cannot see how psychiatric evaluation as currently practiced is particularly relevant to establishing guilt.

Those linguistic conventions are presumably shared expressions of our belief. And here I am trying to use your terms.

Are you suggesting that we cannot have a conversation in which we both talk about the same thing?

Because I know that's wrong. — Banno

How is disagreement possible if we really are talking about the same thing?

By "the same thing" I include any intuition or phenomena that the observer experiences as a result of their mental state. So if we look at the same sky and disagree about tomorrows weather due to having had different past experiences, we aren't looking at the same thing by my definition.

Suppose someone says "Only the sky we share before us is objective, and our private intuitions are subjective and irrelevant". This isn't a deep epistemological statement about the world we experience, this is merely a statement about a linguistic convention that ignores the private facts of each person.

It might have practical significance. What if the equation in question controls a piece of machinery, and getting it wrong means the machinery fails? Rocket fails to launch, bridge collapses, patient dies. That kind of thing. I think I would be correct in saying that it then becomes a matter of objective fact. — Wayfarer

Right. But does this necessitate the concepts of truth and falsity? Don't all statements refer to objective facts, even the so-called "false" or "subjective" ones?

What if we interpret an engineer's words as being necessarily correct whatever he says and whatever happens as a consequence of his words? In other words, we understand an engineer's words in the same way we understand a photograph generated by a camera, that is to say idiosyncratically as a snapshot of the time and place the words were uttered.

To my understanding, the philosophy of trivialism understands falsification in terms of miscalibration; a person's words can be taken-wrongly by a community as a consequence of the person disobeying a linguistic convention. And his words are taken-rightly by community once it identifies the causes of his words.

If someone looked at an equation on a blackboard, and said ‘that’s wrong’, is that a matter that can be explained in terms of stimulus and response? — Wayfarer

If all stimuli impacting upon the individual accounted for, both external to and within the individual, then I am at a loss to know whatever else "that's wrong" could refer to.

It is only by linguistic convention that the shared expressions of our beliefs are said to refer to the same object, and our conventions fools us into thinking that "right" and "wrong" have deep epistemological significance.

It isn't clear a priori what the object of a belief could be, other than the immanent and immediate stimuli that provoked the expression of the belief.

If someone looks at dark clouds in the sky and says "it is about to rain", the object of the belief is on any scientific explication of subject's stimulus-response, nothing more than the presence of dark clouds in combination with the subject's mental state, making the belief a necessarily true statement concerning only the present. A contradiction of a belief by a future course of events is then a contradiction obtained via post-hoc revision of linguistic convention.