Is there a broader ideological system that you ascribe to? — _db

Difficult to answer simply (as I suspect is the case for most people) broadly old-school socialist probably fits the bill best.

It seems to me that in order to help other people, you have to take care of yourself first. Devoting a significant amount of time and energy to aiding the modern slaves of the world requires that certain conditions be met in your own life. But I can't define what the threshold is between justified self-care and gratuitous self-care, it seems fuzzy. — _db

Yeah, I agree with that. I suppose that other people's position on where that threshold is would be my point of argument. Is it something that's just a personal matter, or does society get to have a discussion about where it is.

I think that if there is anything to criticize about the social justice movements in developed countries, it's the way they have been commodified and turned into just another avenue for consumption. — _db

I think this is true too, but does that mean you don't see them playing any obfuscatory role at all? Is it just coincidence that resolving these modern issues, even to the complete satisfaction of the complainants, would have absolutely no impact on the capitalist class at all? Have they just got lucky with what's bothering the modern youth?

if your response is to attack the speaker - "this person is a moron" - you have changed the subject from global warming to the person saying it — yebiga

Yes.

this is the death of discourse. — yebiga

Why?

The person being told they are a moron has nowhere to go - even if they were to suddenly flip their view - they would only confirm the moronic title. — yebiga

They could educate themselves, do their due diligence with regards to sources, do the work required to join the discussion in question.

This form of ad hominem is all too common and all too unproductive. — yebiga

That's an empirical claim. Is it unproductive? Do you have some reason to think so?

I think it's equally likely that failure to exclude poorly researched positions from the debate ends up swamping it with nonsense, occupies everyone's time pointing out the most basic errors and so does more to stifle debate that exclusory behaviour would.

Freedom of speech does not preclude the public shaming and ostracizing of those who abuse it. — _db

Well said.

If one is free to say "global warming is a hoax", then I'm equally free to say " this person is a moron and we ought not entertain their views"

Too often 'free speech' is confused with a right to be taken seriously. The right to be taken seriously is earnt, it's not a birthright.

I think we can see the mistreatment of homosexuals in economic terms as well, as they would not produce heirs to a lineage. — _db

That's an interesting idea. I'm not sure how it would flesh out, but might be fruitful line line of thought...

The straight white men that complain about reverse racism or reverse sexism need an explanation for why their lives suck, and they incorrectly and stupidly attribute it to the social justice movements of women and minorities, rather than capitalism. — _db

But this a feature, not a bug.

As said (though I'm sure for different reasons) cui bono?

Who benefits from the fact that the white working class cisgender males (the vast majority of the working class) have such a convenient, and unending supply of alternative sumps for their anger?

Who benefits from the fact that the oppressed are never just 'the poor' and the oppressors never just 'the capitalists'?

What I'm saying is that getting white cisgender males to think about class struggle rather than race/gender/sexuality is really, really easy...stop feeding them a non-stop diet of news about race/gender/sexuality so that they can actually think about other issues for five minutes.

What's a lot harder is getting the wealthy black, the wealthy women, the wealthy homosexuals and the wealthy transgeneder to realise the oppression they suffer (which is genuine) pales into insignificance compared to the thousands of children dying from poverty on a daily basis, the homeless, the ones that can't afford to heat their homes this winter... The issues that should fill entirely the front page of every newspaper to the exclusion of all other stories until they're solved. The problems that should absorb every ounce of campaigning fervour.

With regards to the poor white male's grievance or the rich black trans lesbian's, I have little sympathy for either. Both are clutching at exculpatory narratives, both are looking to distract attention from the fact that their very lifestyles are an act of oppression against the actual poor - the sweatshop worker, the peasant farmer, the modern slave.

Straight white men merely need to wake up and join. — _db

Join what?

Race struggle is primarily of economic origin. Oppression was class oppression, literally about an economic transaction (slavery), at first, then about a supply of cheap labour, justification for colonialism...

Feminism likewise. The oppression of women being largely about the control of inheritance through sexual oppression and marriage inequality, control of offspring...

Just because those two minority struggles were parallel to class struggle in their goal of unshackling said minorities from their economic ostracism, doesn't mean we can just subsume any other minority struggle in class struggle.

I see nothing in the mistreatment of transgender people or homosexuals, for example, which plays an economic role. It's just prejudice.

Class struggle is intimately tied to race and sex struggles. I see very little connection with most of the issues on the modern white cisgender male's hate list.

In reality, the vast majority of them belong to the same class as everyone else: the working class. If straight white men developed class consciousness, this jealousy of other people different from them would dissolve, because they would have a support group and a meaningful social narrative in which they could place themselves. The fear of other people different from them would also dissolve, as they would identity with these folk as fellows of the working class. — _db

Why would it be on the white, male, working class to bring about this solidarity? Are other members of the working class exempt from such a duty? Or are the white males the only ones holding out?

The difference being that we can say what kettles, tables or teacups are, but not so Jabberwockies, it would seem. — Janus

Maybe. But I can say that Jabberwokies are tall hairy creatures with purple noses. I can instil in your mind the notion that one might reach for the word 'jabberwocky' on seeing such a thing. I can do all this without jabberwockies having to actually exist.

Your trigger and your response can both exist without the causal object existing.

I have to have criteria I rely on to reach a decision regarding an entity about whether it's a jabberwocky or not. Those criteria might be characteristics of the thing, but might be as simple as me believing that you possess such criteria even though I don't, and just asking you and trusting your judgment. — Srap Tasmaner

You seem happy to let factors other than properties of the putative object act as membership criteria - so why not "the thing I treat this way". If I feel inclined to treat it thus, then it's a jabberwocky. Does that not serve as sufficient criteria?

for a long time I've been uncomfortable with the way classical logic is constructed... — Srap Tasmaner

Well, at least I'm only taking a pop at some form of naive realism, I think the target on your back is bigger than that on mine if you want to take down classical logic...

I think we handle sortals quite differently from predicates. An entity that is barking might not be. Some entities that are mine might not be. An entity that is a dog is always a dog, and couldn't be, for instance, a lamp of mine that is now on or off. — Srap Tasmaner

Classic John Hegley monologue seems fitting here, I'll paraphrase for brevity...

John came home one day to find a large white sliced loaf on his kitchen table. he hadn't bought it and didn't even eat white bread. It had one of the crusts missing. While John was puzzling over this there was a knock at the door.
"Have you seen my dog?" asked the man at the door, "He's gone missing".
"What does he look like?" asked John.
"Like a large white sliced loaf" said the man.
"Ahh!" said John, "With one of the crusts missing?".
"Yes" said the man "He lost it in a fight".
John went into the kitchen and brought the white sliced loaf from the table. "Is this your dog?" he asked...

... "No" said the man. "that must be somebody else's dog".

you're also erasing all the different ways we might reach for to describe entities and calling them all behaviours, and then even identifying the entity itself as a bundle of behaviours. It's behaviours all the way down, with no agents anywhere.

Which means all we ever do now is describe behaviours, and bundles of behaviours, and that makes them the new entities of unrestricted quantification. Which, you know, fine, but I'm going to be uncomfortable. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not sure what you mean by 'unrestricted quantification'? All I'm saying is that it's difficult not to see us as a cluster of behaviours. It's simply that without behaving we'd decay, we resist the entropic gradient, that's we are a distinguishable something and not a sea of homogeneous soup.

You could have kettles and teapots as objects apart form our behaviour toward them, but what would that mean for them to be so? what would it mean for the boundary between teapot and ~teapot to be thus and not thus other than our treating it so? Even for you to declare it to be is some behaviour, no?

you're starting with a lot of conceptual apparatus about entropy and the laws of thermodynamics and all that, and then using that to explain the being of entities. Even apokrisis (who has a related big story) doesn't try to do that, but starts from a more fundamental metaphysics and then gets the physics out of that — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah. I think that's fair. But I don't see any grounds for a kind of 'order of events' with regards to lining up one's presuppositions. Is there a reason why metaphysics must proceed physics when ensuring one's presuppositions cohere?

you want to explain being in terms of physics, but that's backwards — Srap Tasmaner

I don't see why. In order to think we have to have brains, but that doesn't mean we can't then revise our understanding of how we think with our empirical data about how brains work. Likewise, just because we must exist prior to learning about physics, I don't see why our knowledge of that physics shouldn't then form part of our narratives regarding what that existence is all about.

Point being, you come along, a methodological behaviourist, and tell me, in essence, that it turns out your methodology is literal fact, that it's not just a matter of modeling entities in terms of their behaviour, but that entities just literally are their behavior. Now maybe you're right, and you were terribly lucky to have chosen a methodology that turns out not to be a research strategy but a factual description of the universe -- or maybe, just maybe, you're projecting the structure of your thought onto reality. — Srap Tasmaner

But that's exactly what I'm doing. Exactly what everyone is doing. How are they not? How is anyone not constructing their reality from the priors their 'methodology' hands them? With what would one construct reality otherwise?

All we have, absent our methodological assumptions, is an unfiltered sea of raw data and noise.

If you are interested, let me know and I will make an attempt to articulate the topic more clearly in a new thread. — Banno

Yeah, sure. I fear we may well be on our own in such an interest, but I feel the same way from the other side (how the theories of cognitive sciences mesh with those of ordinary language philosophies and their descendants). There seems to be a trend, which I'm not at all on board with, to co-opt cognitive science's models into full blown idealism and/or relativism. It's a struggle, with our current tools, to find a route which keeps those insights that are important to my work (were important, I should say - mustn't pretend I'm not a corporate sell-out now!), yet doesn't fall into, what I see as a trap of assuming something like idealism.

that's an argument that we don't need concepts at all. — Srap Tasmaner

I think it's an argument about what concepts are, not whether we need them.

What kind of cognitive psychologist are you?Too much Quine and Wittgenstein in your diet. — Srap Tasmaner

Ha! You'd have hated my theories of 20 years ago. I started out research in social psychology, only moving to cognitive science in the last few years of my academic career. I'm basically a behaviourist masquerading as cognitive scientist in order to get goes on their cooler kit...

Wittgenstein and Quine came even later.

Second, absent a concept of jabberwocky-hood, I can't treat anything as a jabberwocky, because for all I know it is a jabberwocky. I am, when it comes to jabberwockies, incapable of pretense. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, so treating something as a Jabberwocky is what something's being a Jabberwocky is. Jabberwockies (or kettles, or tables, or teacups...) are not ready-made items, we construct them enactively, we interact with those hidden states and by our interaction construct those boundaries (between kettle and not-kettle).

suppose, perhaps because I was told to, I throw jelly at something, and do so with the understanding that this is how you treat a jabberwocky. I'm still incapable of inferring that I should pelt something with jelly because I believe, even erroneously, that it is a jabberwocky. And I am incapable of having a disposition to treat anything this way — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not seeing why. You'll have to join the dots. What actually is the concept of a jabberwocky, for you? What kind of thing is it? what properties does it have? You seem to want to invoke it as a necessary piece in the process, but I don't see it's role.

You're determined to sound like a behaviorist philosopher of fifty years ago or more, but you know that's a non-starter, so you push some of that style of analysis "inside." I'm sure there's a way of construing this that's uncontroversial -- neuroscientists are prone to talk about your brain telling you stories and so on, but of course that's largely picturesque; there's no cocoa or blankets involved. So did you mean the word "behaviour" as literally as I thought you might? — Srap Tasmaner

In all likelihood, yes. I don't know about behaviourist philosophers, but behaviourist psychologists are still very much alive and kicking, there's a difference between Skinnerian behaviourism and methodological behaviourism. The former is (thankfully) dead, but the latter is still bread and butter to a considerable volume of research, my own included.

What we're talking about, at root, is what it is to be an entity at all. What distinguishes an entity from all that is not it. In order to carry out that trick an entity must push against the homogenising force of entropy, it must resist being scattered hither and thither, and maintain, against the odds, it's unity. Right there is behaviour. Not only are we nothing but soup without behaviour, but behaving (acting against the gradient of entropy) is what we are. We are units of anti-entropic behaviour.

In this sense, there's only two relevant questions of cognition - what behaviour is that preparing us for, and what anti-entropic outcome are we expecting from it? The first part is the behaviourism, the second the story-telling.

We can't treat things as black if we don't have the concept of something being black — Srap Tasmaner

Really?

"If a thing is a 'jabberwocky', you ought throw jelly at it."

Don't you now know how to treat something as a jabberwocky? (Ie throw jelly at it)

At no point in that did you need a concept of what a jabberwocky actually is.

Treating something 'as being black'. Is like this. A set of behaviours (including mental ones) - reaching for the word 'black', recalling your recent space voyage, not giving it fair access to the justice system (political!). There's a cluster of behaviours we'd recognise in others as them 'acting as if x was black'. I'm suggesting there's nothing more to a thing being black than us being prepared to act that way, to adopt those policies.

The horror! The horror! — Srap Tasmaner

Entirely appropriate response. Nonetheless...

That's a really nice question. I'm trying to avoid knee-jerk responses to it, so no answer yet — Srap Tasmaner

Thanks. Probably ought to take a leaf from your book regarding the jerking of the knee.

I look forward to your thoughts.

Can't please anyone round here can I? Too idealist for the hard-nosed realists, too realist for the hard-nosed idealists...

Under a policy of assuming what? That it is black. You're saying the same thing I did but in language that sounds more scrupulous. — Srap Tasmaner

You're giving it's being black a different status to the belief (or so it seemed). Something's 'being black' is just saying that we're proceeding under a policy of treating it as black. There's the policy (the assumption, the behaviour) and there's the cause of that policy. The cause is hidden (necessarily so, otherwise it would be part of 'us' and it's be something outside of that we'd be creating a model of). The policy is not.

We talk about the cause. 'A black marble' is my word for the thing I'm modelling as a black marble, it's not my word for the model. But epistemically, all I have is the model, not the black marble. I act according to the policy, not the actual marble. My actions are constrained by the actual marble, it limits what policy I can act under (regarding it), but being constrained by the marble and being caused by (or otherwise directly connected to) the marble are two different things.

FWIW, I had the king asking Jack if what Marvin said was true. I did not have the king thinking that — Srap Tasmaner

My bad. Same applies, he can only ever be asking for Jack's opinion. He's surely not thinking Jack can somehow provide him with unmediated contact with the location of the barbarians, it must be filtered through Jack's biases, errors, misrememberings... The King knows this. So when he asks 'Is that true?', either he's lost his mind, or he's asking if Jack agrees (with emphasis - he's not asking for a guess).

...Or is it infinite tower of models? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, basically.

I'd really rather argue something else because we still seem to be locked in this bubble of arguing about concepts and assertibility. I'm pretty tired of those kinds of arguments. — Srap Tasmaner

I think here we can circumvent the usual stuff about models. Here I think the argument about truth stands only on the basis of what people can possibly be using the word for. If they're using the word to get at the 'real world', then why wasn't the original unadorned proposition about that in the first place?

If I ask "is 'the cat is on the mat' true?" why am I only now asking about correspondence in a way I apparently wasn't with "is the cat on the mat?"

Do you think the world that constrains our models is separable from the measurement apparatus we use to observe it, and the methods of interpreting those measurements, both of which are products of our models? — Joshs

No, I don't. But I don't think a theory that the world constrains our models is itself constrained by our lack of ability to measure those constraints outside of our modelling assumptions.

Are cats and mats inside or outside the structures we erect? — Joshs

I think so, yes. 'cats' and 'mats' are just labels, words... we can label things which we can't directly perceive. I can label the planet orbiting Alpha Centuri 'Bob' and we can then talk about the atmosphere of 'Bob'. 'Bob' doesn't even need to exist for such a conversation to be functional. So the fact that I'm modelling a cat (and your model of it might be different), it doesn't prevent us from using a word to refer to {the thing you and I are modelling}, we don't even need to know we're both modelling the same hidden states. As long as the conversation works, that's all that it needs.

Can we say, then, that e correctness or incorrectness of ‘the cat is on the mat’ only ever makes sense from within a structure of intelligibility rather than as a comparison of that structure with some constraint wholly outside of it? — Joshs

Yes, absolutely. The whole game of 'correct' and 'incorrect' is a construction too.

To me, the simplest way to understand that is that the king is asking, not about Marvin's words, but about what Marvin's words are about — Srap Tasmaner

...then why ask Marvin? Surely he knows that in doing so he can only be asking Marvin's opinion about the barbarians... which Marvin has already given. 'True' here might mean {'Are you sure?'}, or maybe to re-emphasise {'You're gonna get it in the neck if you're wrong!'}, or even {'You're joking, right?'}.

I don't see how anyone aware of how perception works could think that adding a word magically causes Marvin to directly relate the actual position of the actual barbarians in a way that just asking wouldn't have done.

I can see what you mean about the straightforward appeal of saying that when we ask 'Is it true?' we're asking if the world is indeed that way. But what then do we make of asking 'Is the cat on the mat?' Is that not asking how the world is? and if so, then what additionally is 'Is it true?' asking.

If anything, I can see more of a case for 'Is the cat on the mat?' being about the world and 'Is "the cat is on the mat" true?' being about confidence, certainty, or trust.

We don't have models, not in science, not in our heads, only to make predictions about what our models will do, but to make predictions about what what we're modeling will do. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree. We model the world and the subject of our sentences is the world (not the model). So when I ask 'Is the cat on the mat?' I'm asking about both cat and mat in the actual world, the one which I'm modelling. But I'm not sure how this translates to asking 'Is "the cat is on the mat" true?

The question at hand is not, for me, 'is there an actual cat and an actual mat?' I'm quite sure there is an actual world we're modelling (though we may be wrong about it, of course), but the question is 'what does the word 'true' do in the sentences in which we use it?' Does it somehow tie the sentence to the world any more than the unadorned sentence? I don't think it does. Does it add emphasis? It seems to.

So yes, there's an actual world that is the object of our models, but is that what we mean by 'true' and 'truth'? I don't think so.

Suppose I collect marbles in a big jar and have fashioned a clicker so that each time a marble is dropped in the jar a counter advances. I have a very simple model of my marble collection that captures only the total quantity. But it does actually capture that, doesn't it? So long as the clicker is properly designed and works as designed, and there are no confounding factors like a hole in the bottom of the jar, my model faithfully represents my collection with respect to quantity. That it is a model, that it substitutes one medium for another, that it is representational, doesn't automatically mean that words like "truth" and "knowledge" are only expressions of confidence does it? — Srap Tasmaner

Well...depends how far you want to get into the constructed reality stuff. I'm not as far gone as some. But by and large, you have a model of how your clicker works. It coheres with your model of your marbles in their jar. In what way is the clicker (and your model of how it counts marbles) any better a measure than the other way round? If you were sure your jar contained 60 marbles, but your clicker has it at 59 is the model of the jar wrong, or the model of how the clicker works?

So what gets you from, ahem, the model of predictive modeling to everything being a matter of confidence, narrative, and so on? I honestly don't know what you can say here except that it's your knowledge of how our clickers work, and that they're known to be less accurate and less precise than my marble counter. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. If you and I, and a dozen others, were trying to 'mind-read' how many marbles there were in the jar in the next room, we don't need to actually know how many marbles there 'really' are to know that we cannot 'mind-read'. All we need is for you to say '59', me say '27', and everyone else some other number. It become apparent that we cannot mind-read the contents of the jar. We can know this without ever checking what's in the jar.

So, likewise, we only need look at how perception works (specifically the differences between people) to have a good idea that the world we're trying to model is something other than we model it to be (unless by luck, one of us is spot on).

What is the content of the belief I hold with a confidence of 0.9? That the marble is, in fact, black. — Srap Tasmaner

That proceeding under a policy of assuming it's black will yield fewer surprises.

I hold that my confidence should be 0.9 because I know, for a fact, how many marbles are black and how many are white. If I don't know that, upon what would I base my partial belief? — Srap Tasmaner

Your prior model. You base your belief on your priors. So if your prior model had a 90% confidence that working under a policy of assuming the marble is black will yiedl fewest surprises, then, unless updated by some actual surprise, that's the policy you'll proceed under.

I don't have knowledge but only estimates, those are estimates of how many there actually are, and estimates are better or worse depending on how close they are to being the actual number. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I think that's right. The constraints the world places on our options are revealed in the surprise (or lack of it) resulting from proceeding under a policy of assuming the world is that way.

One difference here from the direct realist is that the world only constrains our options. Nothing prevents two models from both being good if neither are constrained by the world such as to yield surprising outcomes when followed.

to make any use of that, he has to know the result of his imaginary experiment. — Srap Tasmaner

Does he? Or does he only need move on to the next experiment - an experiment about how confident he is regarding what the results of the previous experiment was.

I don't see any requirement fo this so terminate in anything more concrete than the beliefs are in the first place. Quinean webs of belief (as I'm sure you're familiar with). Why must one of them be the actual data?

I think I probably gave mine earlier, but...

I don't see any mechanism by which we could possibly investigate (or draw conclusions about) what 'truth' is other than by looking at the ways the word is used.

Clearly, a pure redundancy is untenable. People use the word in some cases and not in others so unless they do so at random, we ought conclude that something separates the times when they do from the times when they don't.

When do people use 'true'?

To add emphasis to a statement of belief. To convey certainty. To convey trust. To add social weight to their opinion. As a stick to beat their opponents...

Therein, I'd say, are the meanings of 'true' and there's nothing more to truth than what the word means.

People are sensitive about 'truth' entirely because of that last use. They don't want their stick taken away.

The entire premise of Moore's paradox is that there is something that we would never say even though, strictly speaking, it's logically true. — Michael

What does 'logically true' mean here?

there is a possible world in which aliens do not exist. — Srap Tasmaner

What would render a world impossible? Are possible worlds all those which are allowed logically? If so, how does one express the possibility of one having made an error in logic?

If you think it’s best to force me (cause it to come about such that :roll:) I work for a company the rest of my life unless I kill myself, no amount of research or outcome would justify that. — schopenhauer1

I don't.

Anyone can justify doing anything that affects another’s life significantly in the name of community. A slippery slope! — schopenhauer1

How so?

no amount of research predicts the unknown harms that result. Things change literally day to day, moment to moment. You’re not a god that “knows” exactly how much harm will take place. — schopenhauer1

I see. So the lava baby's mother should perhaps just carry on. After all, who can tell what will happen in the future? It's such a mystery. Maybe the lava will do the baby good.

More importantly, who are you to judge of what is acceptable for someone else to endure? — schopenhauer1

Unless you plan on becoming a hermit, you are constantly deciding what others have to endure.

Why should they even have to endure it? — schopenhauer1

Someone has to. To give a simple example, either the elderly have to endure starvation because there's no younger generation to look after them, or the younger generation have to endure some suffering associated with being alive to feed the elderly. The non-suffering option is to make life for the youngsters really good.

this is a terrible attempt at causative ethics. — schopenhauer1

Nothing causative about it. It's assigning the object of an imposition, not the consequence of one.

You wouldn’t kidnap someone to take care of the elderly, or would you? — schopenhauer1

I would if I had to, yes. why on earth would you let hundreds of people starve just to preserve one person's autonomy?

You don’t get to do significant things to people because other people say they don’t mind it. — schopenhauer1

You do.

Ethically, being the judge that significant harm is acceptable to create for someone because you think you have “reasons” is problematic. — schopenhauer1

Not in the least bit problematic. As I said before, if you want a set of rules which essentially say we must never ever impose anything on individuals for the benefit of the community, then you don't have an ethical rule, you just have a neo-liberal political agenda. Put down the Rand and back away.

"p is true" means that the person making that statement is presenting themselves as making an honest judgement. which only an habitual liar needs to do. The rest of us always present our honest judgement and the truth of it it 'goes without saying'. — unenlightened

Ha! Suspicion of the emphatic, those who have to proclaim they are the truth tellers. I like it. It goes nicely with my suspicion of those who divide the world into the "habitual liar" and the "rest of us" who "always present our honest judgement".

I find it quite telling that a twenty-seven-month-old child knows when "there's nothing in the fridge" is false — creativesoul

Yet you've not demonstrated that to be the case within the context of this discussion. This discussion is about what 'false' means. "What is truth?". That's the title. Since your granddaughter did not use the word 'false' all you've shown is that she acted in accordance with what you think 'false' means, not that she knows what the word 'false' means.

Notwithstanding that, I find the whole story (whilst endearing) to miss the point completely. Consider if I say "There's nothing in my hat", and some smart-arse replies "False. There's air in your hat!"

Do we really want to say the smart-arse is right? Or would we rather say the smart-arse has misunderstood what I meant by 'nothing' in that context?

You granddaughter, bless her, did not spot a falsehood, but misunderstood the meaning of 'nothing', which any more en-cultured adult would have realised meant 'nothing-for-you', not literally nothing. Other wise almost everybody would be wrong when they say 'nothing' unless they're referring to a vacuum.

The point of all this is that language is not about the literal words we say, we can make mistakes (derangement of epitaphs), we can use the same word to mean several different things, we can be sarcastic, ironic, flattering (all of which involve lies)... and our interlocutors understand our intent and act accordingly.

Unless we're to reify the concept 'truth' to some Platonic form floating in the ether, then is just a word. It does a job and it, like every other word out there, does a different job in different circumstances.

The only analysis of it is the success (or otherwise) of its uses. Everything else is sophistry.

I'm a bit surprised to find myself explaining this. I would not have thought is contentious.

Belief and truth are different. — Banno

I don't think anyone is claiming truth and belief are the same (nor can I really see any cause to think they might be). When people say something like "my truth, your truth", or some such, they are treating truth as a property of beliefs. They may still be confused in doing so, but if you have such an argument to make, then at least address the error. They are not simply saying belief and truth are the same thing.

"My truth" can refer to the collection of beliefs of mine which I am virtually certain of, as opposed to those about which I remain unsure. Again, this may be completely muddle-headed, but it is not simply assuming belief and truth are the same thing so requires a better counter-argument than simply pointing out why they're not.

I can see the philosophical merit in restricting truth to a property of propositions. I can also see the philosophical merit in a T-sentence definition of what it means for a proposition to be true in these terms. I think it clears up a lot of confusion - particularly the reification of truth.

But people do successfully use the word truth other ways. They communicate felicitously with 'true' as a mere emphasis of certainty attached to a belief, likewise with 'true' acting as a declaration of trust or faith, likewise with 'true' acting as a standing (more or less) for 'successful' with regards to policy, likewise with 'true' meaning something more like 'any rational person would agree with me here'...

All I'm saying is that people are both wrong/confused about what 'true' means, and people have different (but perfectly successful) uses of 'true'. It's simply not that case to say that 'we all know what true means', or 'we all know when a statement is true' as if everyone with a differing use were just being ornery.

I would like to move forward on whether it is indeed good for the parent to create someone (they are imposing their will such that a person is born where one would not be because they decided to do this). — schopenhauer1

We already have. We've argued this point before. You dodged having to concede either that it was good, or that your philosophy was essentially selfish and not ethical at all, by starting to talk about imposing one's will on someone. Hence the importance of the argument that one is not imposing one's will on someone, one is merely imposing one's will (on a mindless object) in such a way as it will eventually become a someone.

If one is reasonably sure (after having done their due diligence) that the situation they're planning to bring about will be a better one for the world in general (their community specifically) then it's a perfectly good thing to do (in ethical terms).

If one imagines their community '+ child' and imagines their community without and can reasonably say the community is better off with the child (that community now including the imagined child, of course), then their behaviour is ethical. It is good that they try to bring about that situation.

... That's it.

There's no question of whether it's right to 'impose one's will without consent' - one imposed one's will on a mindless object, so there's no ethical component there.

There's no question of special consideration for the so called 'one who is affected by that imposition' - the whole community are affected by it. The resulting child is not magically affected more than the elderly couple who now won't starve in their dotage.

There's no question of someone being now 'burdened with existence'. Every entity is burdened with existence. At most you could say that a consequence of procreation is the awareness of that burden (which the gamete wouldn't have had if one hadn't forcibly changed it's level of consciousness) - but since the overwhelming majority of people simply don't mind, this burden seems small in the weighing.

...

And no, it's nothing to do with 'moral calculus'. One could just as easily frame this in denotological terms. "One ought to do what one can to improve the lot of one's community" seems a maxim one would wish generalised.

Cutting a tree down does not force a log to become a log, I don't impose my will on the log, I impose my will on the tree, I force a tree to become a log.

Conscription does not force a soldier to become a soldier, I don't impose my will on the soldier, I impose my will on the civilian, I force a civilian to become a soldier.

Imprisonment does not force a prisoner to become a prisoner, I don't impose my will on the prisoner, I impose my will on the free man, I force a free man to become a prisoner.

And so on... I do not force nor impose my will on a person in making a person out of a gamete.

...

Then there's the question of whether its a good thing. Is it a good thing to turn trees into logs? It is a good thing to turn civilians into soldiers. Is it fair to make free men prisoners?

So. Is it a good thing to make a gamete a person? This can be addressed, but it can't be addressed using arguments about imposing on people or forcing people. Neither of those two things have happened.

The annoying thing about your argument is that in most cases I think the answer to that question is "no". There's a really important argument against having children. It's being buried because you want to blame someone else for your lack of effort.

Nothing was done to the baby born into a lava pit in your sophistically twisted conception. — schopenhauer1

I have no idea what you're blathering about. The baby born into a lava pit was burnt alive in lava. I'd say that's something done to it. The parent, knowing full well it was in the birth canal, dropped into a pit of lava.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with my argument which is about the object on which a person's will is imposed. The closest I can imagine to your example would be if one were of the view that human beings did not have any will, or moral rights until they left the birth canal. If that were the case then yes, I would argue that the parent's will to birth a baby over a lava pit was imposed, not on a person, but on a {whatever we might call the baby in the birth canal}.

The result of such a decision would be a considerable amount of pain with no benefit, it would be a pretty evil thing to do.

I guess lava baby was properly cared for because you don’t believe anything is done to it. — schopenhauer1

What?

Not all senses of "truth" are on equal footing. Many nowadays use it when they're talking about what they and/or others believe. That's what's going on when someone utters "my truth", "your truth", "his truth", "her truth", "our truth", and/or "their truth". They are referring to belief. — creativesoul

No, they are referring to truth. If they are understood, then that's what the word means. There's no god-given dictionary, and if there were it's certainly not the one you happen to have in your head. They may not be referring to truth in the sense you mean it, but you are not the authority on what the word 'truth' ought to mean.

We might, when practising some very strict system of thinking (like one of the many branches of logic) have rules in place about what words mean. But these rules are like those of chess. They don't apply to anyone not playing chess. It's a category error to say that people in their ordinary conversations are speaking wrongly because they don't use a word in accordance with the rules set down for it's use in some given mental practice.

This would imply that there's never disagreement. — Isaac


Why? — Banno

The point is that we all know full well what it takes in order for the statement to be true. — creativesoul

As written we can't 'all know' full well when it's not true otherwise there'd be no disagreements about that. There are. There are relativists, there are idealists, there are solipsists. They all disagree about what it takes for a proposition to be untrue. So unless some of us are lying... some know, others clearly don't.

I think this goes back to what I said about interchangeability. I gave my list, but others would give a slightly different list. I think I get what you're saying about T-sentences capturing all that, but many would still frame their disagreements as being about the circumstances in which a proposition is true.

Someone might, for example, take the position that "the cat on the mat" is true if and only if a reasonable number of their community agreed. I think they'd be wrong. Or that it can be "true for them". Again, wrong. But what are we to make of the fact that there are people who make such arguments. It seems rather indecorous of us to assume they're lying, or being stubborn. So it seems we've no choice but to concede that some people do not know when "the cat is on the mat" is true.

Love this.

Nothing.

Of course - that's what the T-sentence says.

"It's true that my teacup is on my desk" IFF my teacup is on my desk. — Banno

Understanding begins to dawn, I think...

Work beckons, but this is good. Thanks.

We all know full well when it's not true — creativesoul

Nonsense. This would imply that there's never disagreement. It's abundantly clear that in most cases where the word 'true' is used, we do not "all know full well" at all.

That particular statement is true only if, only when, and only because the cat is on the mat.

Tarski's T sentence illustrates that beautifully. — creativesoul

Beautiful it may well be, but it's simply not how the word is used.

On what authority do you define words for a language community which clearly uses them in defiance of your edict?

T-sentences do not set out how "truth" ought be used. They set out the way it does functions in logic. SO no, your third position does not apply to T-sentences. — Banno

That may be the case (I'm not in a position to argue logic with Tarski - though I will say that unless he has universal agreement, then it sets out how Tarski thinks it functions in logic), but saying that how the term functions in logic is how it ought to be used/understood in ordinary use is a normative claim.

If I say to you "It's true that my teacup is on my desk", what am I additionally communicating to you that's not covered by "I really strongly believe my tea cup is on my desk", or "I'm behaving as if my teacup is on my desk and it's working", or "anyone looking at the scene would also believe my teacup is on my desk"?

If it communicates no more information, or serves no distinguishable purpose, then it is interchangeable. If it is interchangeable, then it can be said to mean those things.

"Take something as" as in decide if it is true or not? That''d be a theory of belief, not truth.

Our deciding if something is true, or not, is irrelevant to it's being true. — Banno

It seems you're answering the question "What is truth?" from a position of already holding that truth is not analysable. That's the third position I laid out above, to answer the question, not with any level of analysis at all, but to say what 'truth' ought to be. "It is useful for us to consider 'true' to be unanalysable."

You say "Our deciding if something is true, or not, is irrelevant to it's being true", but the question is not "what things are true?", the question is "what is truth?" I think our deciding if something is true, or not, is very relevant to the question of "what is truth?" because it gives us some understanding of the conditions under which we'd be prepared to use the word.

If an entire island decides that the way to survive a famine is to erect giant statues...

...truth doesn't care what they believe. — Banno

But again, the question is not "what things are true?". @Pie's comment was about the conditions under which a community of language users might use the word 'true'. This gives us insight into what we mean by it. It doesn't tell us which things are true. Exactly the same as an analysis of the meaning of the word 'green' doesn't tell me whether your teacup is green or not.

Sure, analyse the pragmatics, how the word is used. I encourage an analysis of belief. — Banno

But an analysis of belief wouldn't tell us much about the way the word 'true' is used. An analysis of truth would.

Weren't you at pains recently to explain that neural nets do not have beliefs? I had taken it that we had reached a general agreement that the intentional language of truth, belief and desire was parallel yet independent of the neurological language of empirical priors and suppressing free-energy...? — Banno

Indeed, but I must a) still do the translations, and b) more importantly, still believe that what we discover about the brain constrains our metaphysical notions. If we have a metaphysical idea about belief, it must be of use to us (the real us in the real world of brains and neural nets).

So I see two possibilities for defining truth (which it seems - in my ignorance perhaps - that your position falls between the cracks of)

1. What does it mean for us to take something to be true? This is a question of psychology. It's about the psychological notion of belief and that some beliefs seem to have this property of almost full certainty. We act as if they're the case without a plan-B. We are inclined to alter some other belief rather than them if our policy under them is unsuccessful...

Here 'true' is about certainty (not 'true' means 'certain').

2. What the word 'true' means. Here we can talk of propositions and logic, but we must also talk of...

If an entire community passionate believes P, then P functions as a truth for them, as an automatically allowed premise, so long as that shared, strong belief persists. — Pie

... and all the other uses I've raised before.

I don't see a good reason for dropping an analysis of 'truth' founded on a study of the ways it is used.

The third way - defining what 'truth' ought to mean because it would be useful if it did - seems less fruitful than either of the others. I can see some value to it in certain branches of philosophy, perhaps, but also more than a little risk of bewitchment therein.

In fairness, I knew he was referring to the era prior to FDR. That’s often how it’s taught, with some merit. — Xtrix

Probably (though I wouldn't be confident, given the quality of arguments), but yeah, I was just Rand-baiting. It's not for the convincing, it's to see what possible twists and turns people take to defend a belief they hold dear. A difficult thing to observe in one's self, only really observable in others, usually the more dogmatic the better.

The interesting point to craw out here, I think, is the way this is all about money and effort. Just basic greed and laziness - really classic stuff.

@Tzeentch's talk of 'Big Government' is a euphemism for 'government which takes money from me or makes be put effort in'

That's the takeaway from the use of...

government expenditure was about 3-5% of GDP. — Tzeentch

...as an indicator of Small Government.

That's why certain labour laws (to a point), massive bailouts, and government investment are never considered signs of 'Big Government'. Only social welfare, taxation and progressive legislation are. Because these latter take money and impose duties.

We always, in these discussions, end up with the neo-liberals saying that they don't want No Government, only Small Government. When we dig into what that means, it inevitably means that government should maintain all the laws and regulation which help the neo-liberal get rich without constraint, but ditch all the laws which help others.

I'm just talking about claims like "I believe that you are American but it's possible that I'm wrong". My claim is true if my belief is right and my claim is true if my belief is wrong.

I don't have any knowledge of your nationality whatsoever. — Michael

That is about knowledge, since using 'believe' instead of 'know' is all about making it clear your level of uncertainty is greater than 0. Saying "I believe that you are American but it's possible that I'm wrong" is just a tautology. The expression "I believe..." already means (in most cases) "I could be wrong but..."

The 'possibility' of something is a measure of our uncertainty about it, so once we know x is the case, the possibility P(x)=1 which is the same as just x. — Isaac


So you reject fallibilism and claim that knowledge requires certainty? — Michael

I'm trying to use your terminology here so as not to get into six discussions at once about truth, belief, and knowledge. It has been your claim that if you know something, that something is true. If you merely claim to know something, then you're saying nothing different to "I believe..." with a greater degree of confidence. In that case your conclusion is not at all counterintuitive...

We then conclude that I could be wrong even if I think I know everything (and assuming that some p is not necessarily true): — Michael

It's counterintuitive only if you assume that to know something is to have certainty that that something is the case. Something cannot possibly be the both the case and not the case. therefore, it follows that once we've established that something is the case, it is not possible that it it's not the case (our uncertainty about it is 0).

"It is possible that aliens exist" means [ There is at least one possible world in which aliens do in fact exist, and in that world it would be true to say "Aliens exist" ]. This might or might not be our ("this", "the actual") world. — Srap Tasmaner

Clarity it may have, but accuracy...?

"It is possible that..." clearly does not mean only that "There is at least one possible world in which..." otherwise we end up with silliness like my saying "It is possible that I can jump to the moon" being perfectly right.

"It is possible that..." simply reflects (in most cases) our uncertainty. We're saying that although we believe one thing, we cannot be sure it's opposite is not the case.

Which means that once we can be sure what is the case, we can eliminate the uncertainty about it. Once we are sure aliens exists, claiming it is possible that aliens don't exist is just a contradiction, we've only just established that our uncertainty about their existence is zero.

As @Janus, @Banno and I have all been arguing (I think) the matter is about what could have been, and the temporal aspect makes a difference. Here we are saying that our uncertainty about the present is low, but our uncertainty about hard determinism is higher. We know what is the case, but we're not so sure that it was pre-determined and so could never have been otherwise.

The problem here is with using modal logic terms together with knowledge. The 'possibility' of something is a measure of our uncertainty about it, so once we know x is the case, the possibility P(x)=1 which is the same as just x.

Because you say that ◇p ∧ ¬p can never be true. — Michael

No. I said that ◇p ∧ ¬p cannot be true at the same time. Your implication ◇p ∧ p is for all times.

Then you agree with this:

1. ◇p → p
2. If it is possible that I am wrong then I am wrong — Michael

I don't see how. Your argument for which that was the conclusion was wrong. One clearly cannot use such an argument in such cases. The example of the cat shows that.

1 and 3 are false, 2 and 4 are true. — Michael

I disagree. 2 and 4 are false at any given time. It is not true that something can not be the case at the same time as it is possible that it's the case. The very fact that it's not the case completely prevents it from also being the case. Since we've just established that something is categorically preventing x from being the case (the fact that it's not the case), we can't at the same time say it's possible x is the case.

Are you saying it's possible to be x at the same time as not being x?

Because the premise is almost always false. You cannot go from "not p" to "not possibly p". — Michael

If I'm not a cat, I can't possibly be a cat. I could have been, but I cannot actually be at the same time as I'm not.

Which part do you disagree with? Do you think that the conclusion is true or do you think that the premise is true even though the conclusion is false? — Michael

I think the logical entailment is wrong. As per my reply...

If I'm not a cat then I can't be a cat
Therefore, if I can be a cat then I am a cat. — Isaac

It doesn't seem to matter what we put into that syllogism (right term?), it seems to come out wrong.

After all...

If I'm not {right about this} then I can't be {right about this}
Therefore, if I can be {right about this} then I am {right about this}.

If I'm not wrong then I can't be wrong
Therefore, if I can be wrong then I am wrong — Michael

If I'm not a cat then I can't be a cat
Therefore, if I can be a cat then I am a cat.

It doesn't work no matter what.

So either you've broken modus tollens, or you've rendered it wrong. It doesn't seem to say anything specific about knowledge.

I think there's something wrong with using 'can be' as proposition to be negated...?