We need some way of trying to answer moral questions. — Pfhorrest

Democracy, persuasion, tradition, consequentialism, virtue... It seems we have plenty. Do we need another?

Moral claims tell you what to do regardless of your personal goals. This is often referred to as "objective", but the term "objective" has some unfortunate baggage associated. Perhaps it's better to call it "apodictic". Moral claims are prescriptive claims that establish a general duty you should follow. — Echarmion

So "You should drive on the left" is a moral claim?

Hmmm who are these "most people?" — Anaxagoras

I don't understand the question. 'Most people' refers to most people, it's a statistical assumption based on the samples that I've had the opportunity to learn about thus far. I get that you might disagree with the assumption, maybe prefer a different range of samples, but I'm not seeing the confusion over the tern 'most people' itself, I'm afraid.

There's always someone poorer than you, but there's always someone less poor who should be doing more. — Isaac


I get what you're saying here, but what does that have to do with the crux of BLM's message of systemic racism and the lack of transparency when it comes to police misconduct? — Anaxagoras

It hasn't got anything to do with it, I don't think you understood what I said. I was saying that unlike poverty (which is a scalar issue) race is considered (falsely, I might add) to be a binomial issue. So I'm not saying it has anything to do with BLM. I'm saying it is unlike the BLM issues because it is scalar (there's always someone both poorer and richer than you). You asked why people have a problem with it. My answer was that unlike poverty (where people can always have both worse-off and better-off), race is (widely considered to be) either 'black' or 'white', not 'more-black' and 'less-black'.

Victims of systemic racism (as a group) is exclusionary, it is not universally possible to both sympathise and be a victim in the way one can with poverty (I sympathise with the homeless, but I'm not paid enough to cover my mortgage). Either I am a victim (where I may or may not also sympathise with other victims) - because I'm black, or I sympathise with victims (but am not one myself) - because I'm white.

My point was that people tend to cope with the guilt of being at some level of prosperity (or opportunity, security, freedom... - whatever measure of well-being you want to use), by also seeing themselves as victims of those higher up the scale than they are. They can both sympathise, and be sympathised of.

Campaigning against systemic injustice based on (false) binomial characteristic like race switches many people off because it puts them only in 'sympathiser' category, not also in the 'sympathised with' category. That makes people uncomfortable. It also makes them look much harder for inconsistencies and hypocrisy, they really want to find some way in which the group they've been excluded from either don't deserve sympathy, or aren't an exclusionary group at all.

Thankfully, the above is not the only psychology in play, and the BLM movement has enough support from other aspects of group dynamics to get some of its objectives met. As I said at the outset, I'm not criticising the movement, you just asked why people have a problem with it. That's my answer.

Truth is vastly over-rated. the analysis of truth I've given here shows that. Belief is far more interesting. — Banno

It's one of the funny things I find about philosophy...

The truth is massively overrated. — Isaac

As you can see, I completely agree with you that truth is vastly overrated, and yet here we are arguing over the exact way in which it is overrated. On the one hand a complete waste of time, on the other still inexplicably addictive and more than a little frustrating trying to see what another person sees in this way...

Anyway, "the game is afoot!".

Describing "the leaf is green" as a useful fiction is deceptive. The leaf is green. Sure, both '"the leaf is green" is true' and 'Fred believes that the leaf is green' have the similarity of being part of our language. That does not make them the same. — Banno

My purpose here wasn't to say the leaf's greeness was a useful fiction, but that imagining propositions to be universals is a useful fiction. They're not (I don't hold with universals at all). The proposition "the leaf is green" can't have any general properties because it is either sound-waves, electrical signal or a sequence of neural states...whatever part of our known world you want to ascribe it to, it certainly doesn't exist in it's own right. all I meant was that ascribing universal properties to it as if it did is useful, but fictional.

To your second point: you already know the difference between use and mention, so I'm puzzled that you haven't applied it here:

"the leaf is green" is true iff the leaf is green

On the left of the "iff" is a statement that is being mentioned. On the right is a statement that is being used. — Banno

Again, I've not explained myself well enough as this is not the point I was trying to make. I get that the one side is a mention, the other a use, but it seemed to me that your account was turning the use into another mention by ignoring is embeddedness in any kind of real social world, the context in which is is a use...

It goes back to my last example, I know it looks pretentious, but I'm going to number them to see if I can pin down what's going wrong.

1. Your account is in the form X is Y iff c is d (where here X is the statement "the leaf is green", Y is the statement's being 'true', c is the leaf and d is the leaf's being green.
2. If "c is d" is to be taken as a use, not another mention, then it is being used to assert or indicate or conclude that c is d.
3. The way we conclude, or assert things like c's being d is by some process usually a collection of processes some arbitrary number of which will satisfy us) - all of which terminate in some perception, or some rule of thought, something like {e,f,g,h} is {J,K,L,M}.
4. So the way in which I see 'truth' being deflated is that X is Y iff c is d (and c is d iff {e,f,g,h} is {J,K,L,M}), then X is Y iff c is {J,K,L,M}.
5. So "the leaf is green" is true iff the leaf satisfies the processes we use to conclude something's greenness...which is the same process we use to 'believe' the leaf is green.

that the sentence "the leaf is green" is used to say that the leaf is green is indeed a social convention. But that the leaf is green - not so much. The world is always, inescapably, already interpreted by our language; the world is all that is the case.

But, that does not mean that we can talk about our interpretation without also talking about the world. Remember Stove's gem; that we must interpret the world in order to talk about it does not imply that there is no world, only the interpretation. " The world is all that is the case" does not say that all there is, is statements; it does not replace the world with language. — Banno

I think this is actually the point of disagreement. I don't hold that Stove's Gem says anything useful. We can know the leaf is made of atoms, just like the air around it, and still have the concept of leaf. It's not impossible, or even difficult for me to hold the idea that 'leaf' is an arbitrary division of matter based on human-specific senses. It's not even that difficult (though harder) for me to hold the idea that atoms themselves are arbitrary units possibly just based on the capabilities of the detection machines we happen to have invented first. Beyond that is ineffable and so, as you so rightly say, we shouldn't try to 'eff' it (a phrase I'm stealing, by the way). The point is, we haven't had to get as far as the ineffible to recognise that both 'leaf' and 'green' are social conventions, we haven't even had to get close. The recognition that the universe is made of atoms is sufficient, and physicists are currently 'eff-ing' much more fundamental dissolutions than that.

To summarise - I think "the leaf is green" is true iff the leaf is green. I also think the leaf's being green is a socially agreed on status - both it's being a 'leaf' and its having the property 'green' are social, conventions, so the leaf's being green is the same thing as that it fits the criteria the society of language users have assigned. Hence the use 'the leaf is green' drops out of the definition, we can directly replace it with something more useful. "The leaf is green" is true if the leaf fits the criteria the society of language users have assigned for 'leafness' and 'greenness'.

I have taken responsibility for raising consciousness ever since I realize what happened — Athena

I don't doubt your intentions, but raising conciousness (whatever that is) is not the same as taking responsibility.

What have I said that you do not believe is true? — Athena

That's simple...

we are what we defended our democracy against. — Athena

No one else made us do this, so we obviously did not defend our democracy against anything.

that past education promoted independent thinking and literacy and a culture essential to our liberty. — Athena

This is self evidently false because if the past education promoted those things then those emerging from it would not have created the society we have today, would they?

Only when democracy is defended in the classroom is it defended — Athena

Again, self evidently false because democracy was defended in the classroom and it lead to a generation of teachers and leaders who no longer defend it in the classroom.

Since 1958 all those not going on to higher education have been cheated out of the education they need to self-actualization. — Athena

Again, self-evidently false. Pre-1958 education cannot possibly have lead to self-actualization because it produced the very people who came up with and implemented mechanical industry-serving post-1958 education.

My generation is horrified by what has happened to our personal power — Athena

Your generation (my generation to an extent, I'm well north of 50) raised the very people currently taking that power away. Why aren't you prepared to take any responsibility for that?

All you've done is listed a whole load of stuff wrong with current society, much of which I completely agree with, but you hark back to a time when things were 'better' in some way. My argument is something in that generation caused this state of affairs.

The people responsible for creating and maintaining the state of affairs you're lamenting were raised by the generation you're treating with reverence. They can't possibly have been that great, they raised a generation of monsters.

for sure that past education promoted independent thinking and literacy and a culture essential to our liberty. — Athena

Obviously it didn't because the generation it produced contained and supported the instititutions responsible for the very industrialisation of education you're complaining about. How can you claim they were successfully inculcated with a "culture essential to our liberty", and in the very same argument accuse them of designing a system to train illiterate robots? Is designing a military-industrial education system something which you find to be essential to our liberty?

I thought people who claim that they are lead by science are objective, open-minded, and ready to admit their failures. — Eugen

Objectivity (insofar as it applies to investigation) is about dealing with shared phenomena, open-mindedness is only about accepting possibilities (not about choosing which to persue), and not yet having all the answers is not a failure in science, but rather the standard mode.

So what you're looking for to accommodate your need for your personal feelings on the matter to be investigated thoroughly and failure admitted when they are not resolved, is a therapist,not a scientist.

Do you (or some scientific consensus) not agree with Kohlberg's stages of moral development? That seems to confirm my own experiences. — Pfhorrest

Kohlberg's stages are about the justification for moral-type behaviour, not the cause of it.

Notwithstanding that, I do disagree with a lot of his work, (see Margret Donaldson, for example, or later Alison Gopnik - Kohlberg's work, and Paiget's, was ill conceived with very young children) but that disagreement isn't relevant here. Kohlberg's stages are, I'd say, not the most prevalent, or up-to-date theories of moral development (look to Gopnick or Tania Singer for those), but they are still adhered to by some. The main point is the one above. They are justificatory, not explicatory.

The problem with your argument is the same as the problem with any "haven't things gone to pot, weren't they better in the old days" argument. Something about them good ol' days caused things to become the living hell they are now. Your lauded system of education pre-1958 can't have been that good because it produced a generation of people willing to design, implement, vote for, and otherwise allow the very system you now decry.

My ideas of what is come from my empirical experiences: my first notion of reality is of the stuff that I can see rather than what I can’t, and every later notion of what is real is a refinement of that nature-given intuition about it. Likewise, my ideas of what ought to be come from my hedonic experiences: my first notion of morality is of stuff that feels pleasant rather than painful, and every later notion of what is moral is a refinement of that nature-given intuition about it. — Pfhorrest

I don't necessarily want to get into this again, but for the thread as much as anything else, you are either very abnormal or absolutely wrong here and this may be the crux of the problem. Virtually all the psychological and neuroscientific evidence we have so far contradicts your assessment. One's ideas of what ought to be do not come from one's hedonic experiences, and one's first notions of morality do not come from notions of stuff which feels pleasant rather than painful. Yours might, I'm not claiming to know your individual mental processes, but if they do you'd be an anomaly, based on the research to date.

One's ideas of what ought to be come from a very complex interaction of the behaviours one is surrounded by, the degree of innovation or conservatism one is feeling at the time (or perhaps even genetically disposed to), the multiple affects (of which pleasure and pain are only two), one's self-narrative (which itself is a construct bourne of dozens of other influences in life), one's value judgement of whomever is going to be affect by one's immanent behaviour, the judgement of others, the degree of engagement of the mirror neuron system (which, again, is actually a result of several preceding factors)... plus probably a handful of other factors I've forgotten. Most importantly though, the vast majority of this goes on sub-consciously and what you have is simply a feeling that acting that way "wouldn't be you".

OK, thanks. Let me see if I've understood so far. You think there's utility to separating some property of propositions from some property of a person (an attitude toward a proposition), and so 'truth' and 'belief' can usefully be employed to refer to these two properties?

If that's the case, I have two issues which are, as yet, unresolved by what you've said so far.

Firstly, propositions are not real objects, they are aspects of human minds, as such properties cannot obtain consistently across all instances of a proposition. the proposition "the leaf is green" is a convenient fiction representing the millions of broadly similar propositions within the millions of minds which house them. As such any properties of such useful fictions are themselves useful fictions, drawn from the same source. Since the fiction of the global proposition "the leaf is green" is drawn from the minds of all the people who understand the language sufficiently to form the proposition, any properties of the 'useful fiction' can only be drawn from the same source. But this would imply truth and belief are the same kind of thing (though not, as you point out, exhaustively so).

Secondly, "the leaf is green" can be shown to be a statement (and so have, by your definition, the property 'truth'), but when you describe the proper assignment of that property - iff the leaf is green - that second is also a statement. Simply neglecting to encompass it in quotes isn't an ex nihilo act of creation whereby we've instantiated some part of reality. You've written (or said) the words "the leaf is green" in both cases. Both cases are propositions. I read some Tarski after the last time we discussed this and I gather he was of the opinion that the two were indeed statements, just in two different formal languages, so that didn't help, but I confess I didn't feel I'd understood the whole thing, so I may have missed something.

Essentially, the two issues keep bringing me back to the same problem, which is distinguishing your position from either full-blown redundancy, or correspondence. I'm edging toward the latter. It seems you want to say that there is some fact (the leaf's being green) which is the truth-bearer of the proposition "the leaf is green". I understand, thus far, your reluctance to allow anyone's belief in this 'fact' to be confused for the actual fact itself. The issue I have id that both 'leaf' and 'green' are social constructs, so the 'fact' of the leaf's being green is only that of agreement among a group of language users that 'leaf' and 'green' are appropriate terms to apply. What is outside of human consensus (I believe) is that there exists some break in the otherwise symmetry of reality which we've all latched on to and which explains our astonishing coherence when talking to one another. What I don't believe is that such breaks are non-arbitrarily chosen - but that's another debate.

The point is, all this leaves me with, in trying to fit your distinction into this wider picture, is that the truth of the proposition "the leaf is green" is bourne partly by the existence of some real break in the symmetry of reality for such terms to refer to (correspondence theory), and partly by the consensus of the language users that 'leaf' and 'green' are the appropriate terms with which to refer to this phenomena.

But at the end of the day, I still come back to the fact that all of this judgement is taking place in human minds (I'm a psychologist - so sue me!). As such I'm struggling to divorce the whole issue from belief. It is still some (dynamically updating) belief which will ultimately result in my applying the label 'true' to a proposition and as such, in the real world, its application represents that belief, but I understand that approach is bourne of my particular academic upbringing and this is, after all, a philosophy forum. I'm trying.

I do question whether, when one's virtual social groups geographically encompass the world, one can actually maintain e.g. racist or nationalistic viewpoints without hypocrisy. — Kenosha Kid

I think the human mind has an incredible capacity for hypocrisy. We do not, despite post hoc rationalisation to the contrary, act in a unified and consistent manner. As you have correctly pointed out, 'reasons' are formed after the behaviour that was going to happen anyway, and it's only reason that has to be consistent. I get what you're saying here, but perhaps has more faith (and so less hope) in the capacity for 'creative' thinking. If racist or nationalistic actions become social norms for large enough numbers, then I think we'll go a long way before running out out post hoc rationalisations no matter how convoluted they have to be to fit our new globalised status. One thing that you left out of your account (perhaps, as you say, just for brevity) is the extent to which existing social norms dictate behaviour. Put together with the process you already mentioned, where behaviour determines beliefs, and you have a situation where existing behaviours can determine beliefs. We can come to believe some group of people deserve some treatment simply because we see that group of people being dealt that treatment.

So how does this relate to treatment of outsiders? Well, if one's own social group is consistent (ie most of the people you meet most of the time are within the same social group and treated with the same level of compassion) then most of the behaviour you'll see happening will be compassionate. This will make it harder to find non-compassionate behaviour tolerable (even when it seems to be required - ie war). I believe this is the situation with wide-ranging tribal communities - which makes them so open to strangers, and we see the opposite in more close to tribal communities (such a Papua New Guinea) where a state of almost permanent war was the norm.

One of the issues in modern society which allows for non-compassionate behaviour (and therefore it's post hoc rationalisation in racism etc) is the fact that it is seen acted out on a day-to-day basis. The relatively wealthy walk straight past the homeless (when Sitting Bull toured with the rodeo for a time he apparently gave away his wages to the destitute in the cities - it's not that he was more saintly than the rest, just that he'd not been inculcated into ignoring them).

Hunter-gatherer communities are notoriously lax with their children, letting them do almost anything. The one exception in most cases is that sharing is enforced. One of the ways egalitarianism is maintained is that non-egalitarian behaviours are simply never seen, and so can't be normalised, and so resist rationalising belief formation, and so are forcibly admonished, and so are never seen...

We broke that cycle.

American white-black relations have been like if more representative people, who had not inherited racist or slavery-affirming socialisations, had mediated them from the start? This starts off looking like a simple question that suggests that maybe if power wasn't so concentrated always among psychopathic opportunists, things might have been better. But of course slavery had been accepted as natural since the middle ages, in no small part thanks to religion, and in no small part thanks to its legal status, so its still likely that even normal people might have gone the same route. — Kenosha Kid

Interestingly, slavery used to be non-racist. Slaves were taken from defeated territories, from those in debt, or just random enemies. It wasn't until Christianity made the subjugation of one's enemies less noble that a new justification was needed and so sub-human races were invented. The behaviour persisted because it was seen and copied, all that was need was a new post hoc justification to match other beliefs (formed from other behaviours elsewhere).

My feeling is that, whatever initial difficulties there might have been in encountering new out-groups, in the absence of socialisations that push us toward pre-social behaviours and suspend our social capacities, and in the absence of a credible existential threat from such out-groups, our natural altruism would tend toward inclusivity. — Kenosha Kid

I agree. In a similar vein I always dispute people who think we're naturally greedy and selfish. If that were the case why would we need advertisements every 45 minutes telling us to buy stuff. Organisations work incredibly hard to get us to behave certain ways, which I see as a fairly clear indication that we wouldn't behave in those ways if left to our own devices. I think the same's true of altruism. We'd rather include as many people as don't present a threat. The trouble is twofold 1) we are surrounded by non-compassionate behaviours which create belief systems to justify it, and 2) there are people whose objectives are advanced by leveraging those belief systems toward some particular group.

Let's try this.

"X=Y" is true iff X=Y (your proposition), and Y={a, b, c, d}.

It follows therefore "X=Y" is true iff X= {a, b, c, d}, yes?

So translating...

"The leaf is green" is true iff the leaf is green, and the leaf is green if {it seems green, other people say it is green, it shows green in my spectrometer ,...}. That's to say that it's being green is a product of it satisfying certain categories, that's what 'being green' consists in, otherwise all you have is 'having a particular set of quantum properties' (or whatever the fundamental make-up of the universe turns out to be). 'Green' is a human socially created category, so is 'leaf', so whether a bit of reality constitutes either is a human social agreement.

It follows therefore that "The leaf is green" is true iff {it seems green, other people say it is green, it shows green in my spectrometer ,...}.

That the leaf is green is not something we just know, it's something we assure ourselves of by various procedures, so the leaf's being green is equivalent to it's having satisfied those procedures

You keep asking what justifies a belief, but putting it in terms of how to tell if something is true. — Banno

Yes, I do (according to your terminology). That's because a suitably justified belief is what gets the label 'true' attached to it. You're wanting to claim this is somehow either the 'wrong' way to use the word, or that justification isn't what's really being judged when people correctly use the word (I'm still unclear which).

What I'm really asking is why. Why you want to define 'true' this way. It's very obviously not the way the word is actually used, inventing an ineffable feeling seems unparsimonious where no such feeling is required to explain what we see... I'm genuinely puzzled by what's motivating you to believe this model.

That is, sometimes our beliefs are wrong. — Banno

Yeah. We find that they no longer match the properties of the other statements in the bin (usually they no longer accord with either our experiences or those of our epistemic peers), so neither system fails to account for propositions being mis-filed.

What's missing (or so it seems to me) on your account is any justification for your claim. Why do you say "sometimes our beliefs are wrong", maybe they never are, or maybe they always are. You can't possibly know with your account of what makes a proposition true because all you have access to is our past beliefs and our current beliefs. You can show that the two sets don't match, but you can't say which, if either, are 'true'. Only that you believe them to be. So it seems you yourself are not even using the term how you'd like us to.

The statement does not go in the "true" bin if we think it true; it goes in if it is indeed true. — Banno

You're being evasive. What I'm trying to pin down is what this property 'being true' consists in. If it is an ineffable property, that's fine, but then you're either committed to some form of platonism or some internal sense and so Wittgenstein's beetle. If you're saying that what it consists in is neither platonic form nor private sensation, then I don't see how your account differs from correspondence.

Green leaves are available for inspection. Boxed beetles, not. — Banno

Inspection is not sufficient, we've just been through that. It's not the greenness of the leaves we're trying to establish, it's the 'trueness' of the proposition. To give the full comparison, the proposition "I'm in pain" contains a beetle if my 'pain' is inaccessible to you and vice versa. The proposition "statement X is true" contains the same beetle if my 'true' is some ineffable judgement of it that's inaccessible to you. We can't talk about it, so the word 'true' ceases to be about the beetle but rather used to satisfy some function.

I'm thinking that you put the statement in the "true" bin if and only if the leaf is green. — Banno

Well, that cannot be the case on the face of it because we never know whether the leaf is green, we only ever have that it seems green and yet we very much do assign propositions to one bin or another. We are all well aware of differences in opinion and none of us so hubristic as to hold our judgements to be concordant always with what really is. I don't think science, or even basic day-to-day experimentation, could proceed at all if we did not hold generally to a model where our understanding of the world and 'the actual world' were two different things. As such anyone seeing the 'the leaf is green' would only ever hold that understanding contingently (it seems green but there is an external world in which it's colour, or the source of it's colour, is fixed; and the way it seems to me might not match that). And yet...we assign 'true' nonetheless. We put the proposition 'the leaf is green' into the bin marked 'true'. So our actual practices with the word seem to be at odds with how you'd like us to use the word and I'm still not quite getting why you'd like it used that way.

all they have in common is that they are true and nothing more. — Banno

Well then the label becomes arbitrary. If all that the propositions we put into the 'true' bin have in common is that they've all been labelled 'true', then we can make a proposition 'true' simply by labelling it such. Or, if you're trying to get at this ineffable quality of some propositions (something we can neither doubt nor verbalise), then how do you account for how we learnt to use the word in the first place - doesn't it become somewhat like Wittgenstein's beetle?

That's a really nicely written piece. I agree with a substantial portion of what you say, but agreement is boring so...

I'm not so sure that you can move as smoothly as you do from the biological description of empathetic pain to the non-hypocritical maxim of the new globalised society we find ourselves in. That pain has not gone away, and I don't think it can be as easily cast aside - socialisation can dictate behaviours, but it is less successful in undermining physiological processes. No matter what level of socialisation determines that priests behave celibate, nothing can fully eradicate their desire for intimacy because it's more physiological. The pain of others is still a cause of affective pain in those with even limited empathy (see Tania Singer's work), so I don't think you can so easily escape from the physiological consequences of ignoring the pain of others just by believing others morally justified in ignoring yours.

I believe, instead, what happens in a globalised society is that we construct flexible and overlapping 'virtual' small-groups, and it is these we use to to determine valuation. Studies showing 'parochial altruism' (the tendency to be altruistic to in-groups than out-groups are notoriously conflicting and one possible explanation is that these groups are not fixed in modern society (not even from moment to moment). So what's happening is that we're using the very same moral decision-making approaches you list in your first half, unaltered. What's changing is the determination of in-group and out-group which is now highly flexible and circumstantial. Evidence for this comes from studies of how people assess the degree of pain they are prepared to tolerate to help alleviate the pain of others (again, mostly Tania Singer's work at UCL). Most decisions seem to have to traverse the nucleus accumbens which is involved in evaluating the status of others, and the degree of activation in that area is correlated with signs on in-group membership (the more obviously in-group, the less activity).

Here's the leaf - I show it to you. Yes, that bit is perhaps ineffable in that there is no rule here, nothing to be said appart from my showing you the leaf and your using the word "green" for it. — Banno

So - obvious question - what happens if I use the word 'spiky' for it because I'm a synaesthete and for me green is spikiness (the leaf, to all others is perfectly smooth). Is it 'true' that the leaf is spiky? How does your approach deal with situations like this (clourblindness, mass-delusion...) where there's a dispute over the word used but one side wants to claim their view is 'true'? Do they have any recourse at all to demonstrate the 'truth' of their propositions to another unwilling to just see it on first presentation?

I'm thinking of our standard practices in these situations. I present you a leaf and say "the leaf is green", you say "that's not 'true', it's yellow". I'd take it into better light, ask others, put it in a spectrometer, compare it to a green swatch... and say "no, look at this evidence I've gathered, it really is green, it's 'true'". Are you wanting to discard these practices in favour of a more ineffable 'gut feeling'? If not, it seem you'd have to consider justification to be at least a part of the definition - otherwise we're in this odd realm where meaning is use for all words, except for the word 'true' for which meaning is some platonic form of the concept.

I'm sure I'm missing something. To me 'true' seems to be a category of propositions - as if we could take all propositions and sort them into two bins - 'true' and 'untrue'. The process by which we sort them is the same as the one we'd use to sort all objects into 'blue' and 'not blue', we compare each to the objects already in the bins and judge the similarity (family resemblance).

With colour, we can (although normal people do not need this assistance) be more scientific about what we're doing in that judgement - we're detecting wavelengths, converting them to beliefs about colour, triggering memories associated with those beliefs and looking for similar memories in the objects we're comparing.

My understanding about truth comes from the same analysis - what it is we're doing when we compare the proposition in question with other propositions in the bin marked 'true propositions', we're recalling the set of properties those propositions had in common. That's how we learnt to use the word 'true' in the first place. My claim is that those properties consist of things like, justification, agreement of epistemic peers, agreement with experience (but only in the absence of reason to believe one's experiences are themselves widely agreed upon)...

I sense you're not looking at the definition of 'true' this way at all, but I'm not really seeing the alternative, nor (more importantly) why you'd want to claim we're not carrying out the above algorithm when it comes to assigning 'true' to propositions.

part of this analysis would be to ensure that we can track when we are talking about a statement being a shared belief and when we are talking about it being true per se. — Banno

OK, but I'm not sure I see how the definition you're providing here helps do that. In order to do this 'tracking' we need an algorithm of some sort, after all 'tracking' is an activity, something we do. So we'd take a proposition (or even just some speech in general) and we'd like to 'track' whether it's a shared belief or true. What do we do to it to achieve this categorisation, what's our first step?

Take an example (a feel free to change examples if this one doesn't capture the distinction you're wanting to make) "The leaf is green". We' want to categorise this statement. Is it 'true' or is it merely something with which epistemic peers would agree. You say the "The leaf is green" is true iff the leaf is green, but this is just another proposition in the form of a description of some state of affairs (of the form "X is the case"). If we're carrying out some process - tracking or categorising is a process, an activity - then we need a statement of the form "if X=y then TRUE, if X!=y then FALSE" where y is some other perceived state of affairs with which we compare X. Otherwise categorising X doesn't seem to be a possible task.

It seems, at times, like you're suggesting that y in this case is ineffible, but that it is necessarily so to capture what 'true' is best off meaning. You don't want to say that the y to which we compare X is {the leaf seeming to us to be green}, because that allows illusions to be true. You don't want to say y is {what my epistemic peers would say} because that admits a kind of truth by consensus you'd like to avoid. So y is {the leaf just being green}, but we can never know this (or do we know it indubitably?), but that doesn't matter because that's an epistemic problem, not a taxonomic one. Is that close?

it's not a bad idea to set aside such uses in order to draw useful distinctions, — Banno

I thought this might be one the main motivations. So I suppose the first question is what you see the utility being here, and I mean that in the most pragmatic sense - like day-to-day. Or is the utility only philosophical taxonomy (which would be fine, of course - I don't mean 'only' in a pejorative sense).

In a similar autobiographical sense, the reason this interests me is that I spent a considerable part of my career studying belief formation, and here the role of 'truth' seemed more about the assertion that an epistemic peer would agree than anything like hinge propositions. I think that may be because no one would (in day-today speech) use '...is true' of a genuine hinge proposition because there would be no coherent way of doubting it and so the qualifier wouldn't even make sense.

I guess what you're trying to do is come up with a proper technical definition of truth for a field of philosophy, rather than impose a definition on day-to-day use, would that be right?

The statements that are true are the true ones. "p" is true iff p. That's pretty much all there is to say about them. — Banno

Here's what puzzles me about your approach here. You've taken a somewhat Wittgensteinian approach to language in many other thread (maybe I'm wrong about this, that could explain a lot), and you already seem to be happy with the notion that 'true' is a property of propositions. 'Blue' is a property of objects. Those objects which are 'blue' are those which match the use of the word 'blue' in the context of a particular language game. So if I said "pass me the 'blue' bricks", you'd select all the one which matched, in colour, with other items you'd been told were 'blue'.. If I said "play me a 'blue' song" you select a song which matched a tempo and subject matter of other songs you've learnt are 'blue'. I kind of got the feel the you and I perhaps agreed that this is how language works.

Then with 'true' you seem to want to change approach. No longer is the meaning of the word 'true' judged by examining it's use in various language games. For some reason 'true' has this platonic meaning that language users a right or wrong about. True statements are those that are true, all other identifying characteristics of the use of the word are discarded as being somehow noise in the data. The fact that people use the word 'true' to mean 'something I strongly believe', or 'something with which most epistemic peers would agree' is discarded as not getting at the real meaning.

Why the different approach with the word 'true'? Why is it singled out for special treatment when writing about its meaning?

To talk about which things we think are conscious, for example. Also to wonder about the experiences of other things. Consider:

John "I wonder what it's like to be a snail."
Jack: "Don't be silly, there's nothing it is like to be a snail. They're not conscious. Their brains aren't big enough to generate experience." — bert1

But you said everything is concious. Jack's assertion wouldn't make any sense under that definition. Jack's assertion would only make any sense if there were some measurable difference between being concious and not, but you're saying that everything is concious, therefore there's no way one could exist, but not be concious.

I can't think of any use for such a term. What's more, we're definitely still going to want to differentiate between the level of awareness humans etc demonstrate and that demonstrated by rocks. So we're just going to need a new word to do exactly the job 'conciousness' does presently, whilst at the same time the original word becomes entirely useless. Why not just use the word as it already is?

Right. So back to my question then. Someone wishing to speak of their own conciousness is already concious, even by the medical definition (although, as you say, their speech ability does not define their consciousness). In all other potential cases it is impossible to distinguish concious from unconscious - indeed, everything is concious you say. So what's the use of the word?

Speaking does not entail consciousness — bert1

Right... So rocks are concious, but things which speak aren't?? This theory is getting more and more bizarre.

Consciousness is detectable to the person that has it. And they may want to refer to this using a word. — bert1

But if they're speaking, they've already satisfied the original definition, so it's not serving any purpose not already met.

But we don't have to limit the use of 'consciousness' (even partly defined in terms of behaviour) to humans. We can wonder, for example, if the responsive behaviour of rocks is evidence of their subjective experience. — bert1

It wouldn't count as 'evidence' of anything. You just redefined the term to include it.

If you say "subjective experience could be defined to include the sort of things rocks have", then obviously the responsive behaviour of rocks will be evidence of it.

I could say red hair was evidence of insanity if I redefine 'insanity' to include all people with certain forms of the MC1R gene. But what would be the point?

The point of having a definition we can actually measure is that we can make use of it "is the patient concious?", "he was knocked unconscious", "were you concious at the time?". What possible use could it be to define conciousness as some property which is completely undetectable?

I’m getting tired of repeating myself, and looking forward to this conversation ending — Pfhorrest

Well then there's little point in continuing.

I quoted what you agreed was prima facie too. You said "apparently normative statements" yourself; they appear normative to you too, but you think that appearance is deceiving. And you know, we could always ask the speakers themselves what it is they're trying to do. I strongly doubt a majority of them will say they're just expressing their feelings. If so, then we wouldn't have moral arguments. — Pfhorrest

None of this makes it not about psychological states.

I can likewise check if supposedly bad things actually seem bad as far as my experiences go:...

If I tell you that it's bad for people to get punched in the face, and you disagree, you can try getting punched in the face, and I expect you'll agree that that sure seems bad!...

you getting punched in the face is bad, but it doesn't matter whether anybody else gets punched in the face -- but then we're back to the moral equivalent of solipsism, and you presumably reject solipsism about reality, you continue believing in things you can't currently see, so this isn't asking anything more than that. — Pfhorrest

There's little point in continuing if you're just going to repeat stuff we've already been through. All of the above presumes that moral statements are merely statements about what feels bad to whom. These are not what moral statements are about. Moral statements are about the behaviour, not the feelings it generates. In your example, the moral claim is not that one ought not to punch another in the face (we don't teach children morality by individual action, one at a a time). The moral claim is that you ought not make another person feel bad. Facts like that another person feels bad when punched in the face are used to determine which circumstances fall under the moral claim and which don't, they are not the moral claim themselves.

So I cannot test, in any way, the moral claim "you ought not make another person feel bad". It simply stands as an assertion, in exactly the same way as "God exists" stands as an untestable assertion. We can argue about the exact nature of that existence (and theologians do), just as we can argue about exactly what actions make another feel bad, but there are no further tests we can carry out to check the objectivity of "god exists", and there are no further tests we can carry out to check the objectivity of "you ought not cause another to feel bad".

You haven't put forth any of their arguments here — Pfhorrest

Some I have, others not. At the moment I'm merely opposing your assertion that moral propositions and factual propositions are sufficiently similar that they need be treated the same. To oppose that I only need point out the differences, not present arguments about the consequences of those differences. In short form, however...

1. Moral statements appear to be statements assigning properties to behaviours, they make claims that behaviour X has the property 'morally bad'.
2. As Moore points out, we cannot 'work these claims back' because we end up infinitely asking ourselves "but why is it bad to...?". - As in... "It is bad to punch someone in the face", "Why is that bad?", "Because it will make them feel bad and it is bad to make another person feel bad "Why is that bad?"...
3. As such, the assignation of 'morally bad' to a behaviour must be either a brute fact of reality (not derived from other facts), or an arbitrary assignation (not derived from facts at all).
4. The latter fails to explain the otherwise unlikely coincidence of assignation across cultures (there's a universal sense one must 'justify' harming another whereas one need not 'justify' going for a walk - harming another seems to be a special category of behaviour). So we accept the former, behaviours being morally bad is a brute fact.
5. So the question, whence the brute fact. Either it is of the physical realm, or it is of its own realm. Inventing realms just to hold propositions when they can be easily explained within the realm we already believe in is non-parsimonious, so we reject the latter.
6. Damage to certain portions of the brain alters what the injured party thinks are morally good/bad behaviours. Being brought up in a particularly violent or uncaring culture affect what behaviours those people think are morally good/bad. Very young babies appear to have senses of justice, as do chimpanzees. So, altogether, the most plausible candidate for the physical origin of the brute fact of the morally good/bad properties of behaviours is in the brain, manipulated by the culture in which that brain develops.
7. Moral statements are therefore an expression of this psychological state.

My entire argument here is just asking what's the relevant difference that makes one deserving of different treatment than the other. — Pfhorrest

Basically, propositions about physical reality have an obvious candidate for the mechanism by which they are made true. An external physical reality. Normative propositions have no such obvious candidate for an external truth-maker. In fact, their unanimity can be completely explained using the external physical reality we have already committed ourselves to, namely that this unanimity is the result of a shred culture acting on a shared brain-structure. Thus making moral statements expressions of this mental state.

Prima facie they are attempts at asserting that something actually ought to be some way or other. — Pfhorrest

What a thing is or is not prima facie is not an objective fact but another statement of your psychological state.

I say to just take that appearance at face value. — Pfhorrest

At face value people who pray very much appear to be speaking to an all powerful God. People who put ivy over the door appear on face value to be sending messages to actual evil spirits. Neither can be disproven. Are you suggesting we take no further steps to assess the likelihood of each prima facie belief but simply presume they're true?

The burden of proof lies on the one who's saying that something is different than it seems, and that something or its negation is not possible. — Pfhorrest

Yes, and non-cognitivists feel they've adequately met that burden. The fact that they haven't convinced you personally doesn't damn the entire enterprise.

You instead cynically want proof from the ground up that it is even possible at all for any normative claim to be right in what they appear to be saying. — Pfhorrest

Again, where have I asked for proof. The fact that I don't find the position plausible is not this obstinate demand you keep trying to caricature it to be.

If you subjected factual questions to this same degree of cynicism, you would be a nihilist about reality too. — Pfhorrest

Yes. But I don't. Because I find the idea of an external reality more plausible than I find the idea of an objective morality.

But that's not a problem for your approach to facts, so why is it a problem for an approach to norms? — Pfhorrest

I don't know how many times I have the interest to keep saying the same thing... Because facts and norms are two different things. I'm not obliged to find arguments for realism in either case equally plausible.

You are merely assuming that they are not, and on account of that refusing to address the contents of those normative opinions at all, focusing instead only on the facts about people having those opinions. — Pfhorrest

I'm not merely assuming, there are cogent arguments for non-cognitivism, it's disingenuous to try to paint one position as more refractory than the other. I think it is more parsimonious to consider moral statements to be no more than they evidently are until we have good reason to change that. Since there's no evidence of an objective 'ought' it makes sense to assume there's no such thing until we have reason to believe there is. It's the same reason I don't believe in God.

Conversely, scientism like yours responds to attempts to treat normative questions as completely separate from factual questions (as they are) by demanding absolute proof from the ground up that anything at all is objectively normative, or moral, and not just a factual claim in disguise or else baseless mere opinion. — Pfhorrest

Why do you caricature my position as 'demanding' whilst yours (which you are no less attached to, is painted as the more reasonable? I've made no 'demands' here. I've just said that I find it more plausible that apparently normative statements are actually just expressive. Is there some reason why my finding this more plausible annoys you so?

it ends up falling to justificationism about normative questions, while failing to acknowledge that factual questions are equally vulnerable to that line of attack. — Pfhorrest

Who said I'm falling to acknowledge that factual questions are vulnerable to that line of attack. Have you read anything else I've written here? I'm strongly in favour of model-dependent realism. But normative and descriptive propositions are different. They may both be vulnerable to the same line of attack, but that doesn't oblige me to find their defences against those attacks equally plausible.

Such glosses talk about experience, qualia (which I dislike), something it is like to be it, subjectivity, having a point of view, and so on.

Your insistence that the medical definition is the only one is very annoying. — bert1

I'm not seeing the difference. The reason we call a knocked-out person 'unconscious' is because they don't appear to have those properties. When they 'come to' again, we mark that they have done so by the apparent return of those properties. If those properties collectively, define conciousness it sounds almost exactly like the medical definition.

you rely on not doubting them, or in other words you treat them as certain.

Of course you might bring one or two into doubt; but in order to do so, you must hold firm to other beliefs. — Banno

I don't know how you achieve this exhaustive binomialism without defining doubt away. How can one doubt something? It's not saying X is not the case, nor saying that X is the case.

So to say that speaking requires that one holds the mutuality of the language to be 'certain' denies the possibility of one simply holding it 'more likely than not'. If you then go on to say "well, the belief that it's 'more likely than not' is that which you hold to be certain", then, as per above, you've removed the definition of doubt.

You need a license to braid hair but not to bring a new human being into the world. Go figure. — fishfry

It's not that complicated. There's an agreed on set of incorrect/harmful actions with regards to hair braiding, there's no such agreement (beyond what is already illegal) with regards to parental character; hence there's a licencing requirement for hair braiding and not for becoming a parent. What's to figure?

Why are some against BLM? — Anaxagoras

I'm not justifying or defending any of these beliefs, but you asked so...

Most people seem to feel some injustice has been done to them if they've not been judged by some variant of the maxim "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need", by which I mean "I wasn't able to", and "they didn't deserve/need it" are considered justification for inaction against injustices.

Inequalities also mean that most people are also in a permanent state of guilt about those less fortunate than themselves, and resentment of those more fortunate than themselves.

The upshot of these two principles is that people are constantly looking to assuage their guilt (using either "I wasn't able to", or "they didn't deserve/need it") without compromising their feelings of just resentment about those above them.

Scalar issues cause little opposition because they fit well into this mode. The fight against poverty, for example. There's always someone poorer than you, but there's always someone less poor who should be doing more. One can acknowledge the issue and act according to the maxim because there's an argument over 'how poor', acknowledging the issue neither commits you to a specific strength of action, nor sets you apart from those who might otherwise 'get ahead of you' in the inequalities race.

Binomial issues, however, do not fit this mode well. There's no discussion about 'how white you are'. White privelidge is not measured like income, its assigned like a badge.

The "from each according to their ability" part seems subverted, if you're white you have maximum ability, if you're black you have minimum ability. There's no scale, so people feel scared to commit to judgement about their role in solving the issues.

The "to each according to their needs" part is also subverted because if you're white you have no needs (insofar as this issue is concerned), and if you're black you are 100% the victim (again, just insofar as this issue is concerned). So again people feel afraid to commit, in this case because they're scared their just resentment of those above them will be taken away (the poor white can no longer justifiably resent the rich black).

As I said, I'm not justifying these positions, just giving my opinion as to the answer to the question.

Usually in philosophy, one is not hemmed in by an either-or. People are frustratingly good at finding alternatives. There are many approaches to consciousness, so it's decidedly not a binary proposition. We don't have to accept or discard anything because it's not a settled matter. — Marchesk

I don't understand what you're saying here. My proposition was that we either discard the idea that consciousness might not be what we think it is, or we accept that it might not be what we think it is. I'm not seeing any 'third way' in that, either accepting or rejecting a possibility seems pretty exhaustive of all options to me.

I ask that you just substitute every instance of “moral” with whatever you would label something that is actually normative, because normativity is entirely what I’m talking about. — Pfhorrest

What I'm saying is that normativity itself is an expressive act, there's no fact of the matter to be had in normativity of any sort because it's a category error to assume it's the sort of thing that's amenable to facts. All normative statements of any sort are expressions of the speaker's feelings, not statements of fact.

I suspect they will not find the solution they are after. — bert1

I suspect it's more a case of them not finding the solution you are after (not you personally, the general 'you'). Much of the debate around conciousness centres on people getting totally hung up on their own feeling about conciousness and expecting everyone else's theories to explain their personal intuitions. The point about the whole 'conciousness is an illusion' analogy though is to question those very intuitions. We either discard the possibility out of hand or we have to accept that the content of our intuitions may be wrong.

Some of them agree with RogueAI. His view does not stand in opposition of to the views of the overwhelming majority of academics studying consciousness. There is no settled position on this such that opposition to it is by default unreasonable. — bert1

I didn't make any claims to the contrary. My snipe was at the pointlessness of a thread OP which contained nothing more than "none of materialist positions seem right to me, when are they going to give up?". The point was why on earth would anyone consider giving up just because the positions don't seem right to @RogueAI?

In summary, it seems to me that you're saying

1. Let's assume that there is an objective moral right and wrong because that way we've got a chance of finding it

- I find this suspect from the beginning because we don't presume there's an aesthetic right and wrong on the same grounds. I don't presume there's a right and a wrong type of hat to wear on the same grounds. So why would I presume there's an objective moral right and wrong, just because that maximises my chances of finding one isn't a sufficient justification.

...but assuming it is for now, you then say...

2. If there is an objective right and wrong, it must be measured by the hedonic pleasure/pain those behaviours cause other people because that's the only measure that isn't either subjective or arbitrary.

- Again, I don't agree that this is the only non-subjective, non-arbitrary measure. Neurological wiring is non-subjective and non-arbitrary and might well show what is objectively right and wrong (in that it is a behaviour which universally causes those moral feeling in all similar circumstances). Such knowledge would provide us with scientifically predictive models to say "if you do X (in circumstance Y) you will feel morally bad about it , that's just the way your brain is wired". That would undoubtedly indicate that X was morally bad. I'm not saying fixed neurology is the right answer, just showing that your 'Golden Rule' isn't the only non-subjective, non-arbitrary measure. Social norms are another such measure ("you will feel bad about behaviour X because it is opposed to your societies norms").

Basically, you're making the assumption that moral statements are normative, I don't agree. I think moral statements are expressive.