The proposal was to stop making men:

STOP MAKING MEN: So, to wrap up this opening post, my proposal is that we "stop making men". That is, control reproduction so as to gradually remove males from the population. — Jake

Unless men were also legally made to be unable to reproduce other men via the same method (throw in artificial wombs) then it is genocide on top of intentional mass discrimination.

Oh, sorry, not "killing", intentional death by attrition. Because euphemisms are excellent defenses.

It is reasonable to condemn bigotry when it is directed against oppressed peoples, and not unreasonable to refrain from condemning it when it is directed against the oppressors, since bigotry is already inherent in the act of oppression..

This is all when and good when you're not talking about genociding an oppressor. "Kill all the men" isn't simple bigotry.

What do you mean by "quantifiable"? I'd simply say that there's no item of knowledge to which knowledge of it is infallible, therefore we don't really possess certainty in this maximal, philosophical sense. We can debate some phenomenological stuff, but even logic and mathematics gets affected by this.

In a colloquial sense, it's just probability. You claim it begs the question, but it really doesn't. The average Joe (myself included), in every day speech, is liable to say that when he's "certain" or "uncertain", he's simply communicating the rough likelihood of something he believes or knows to be the case. It's just a substitution of terms in that case, so I don't see where the question begging enters.

1. A quantity is a specified amount of something. It has a limit. The infinite is that which has no limits and so cannot be quantified. Therefore, not a quantity as not quantifiable.

This is just... no. Look, even if I take your definition of quantity, I can easily show infinity is a quantity. Take the set of Natural Numbers (o, 1, 2, 3...). In set theory, the concept of "size" is formalized as what is known as "cardinality". The cardinality (size) of the set of Natural Numbers is infinity, specifically aleph-null. QED. You can say the Natural Numbers have "no limit" in the sense that it can always get bigger, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to quantify.

2. Infinity is not limited to numbers (because it has no limit). if you say infinity is only a number you have broken the law of none contradiction as you have put a limit on something defined as having no limits. Therefore, infinity contains numbers but numbers do not contain infinity as numbers are limited to number.

A better way to think about it is there are different kinds of infinite numbers, some larger or smaller than others. The set of Real numbers, for instance, is a larger infinity than the infinity of the Natural numbers. Cantor proved this with a proof by contradiction. No one is contradicting themselves saying there are infinite quantities.

Math is non-empirical. This is why no discovery in science has ever overturned a theorem.

Eh, I suppose it depends on what you mean. I mean, we used to think the universe's geometry was Euclidean in nature but the adoption of Relativity seems to force us to accept a Non-Euclidean view given the curved space. "Disproof" is probably an inadequate term here. Something better might be "Science has shown the inapplicability of certain formalisms to certain tasks or even to reality itself".

Another example is possibly quantum mechanics. Classical logic essentially is a logic of individuals (everything has an identity), but this seems to be vitiated in quantum mechanics where there seem to be ontologically indistinguishable "non-individuals" who have no identity (hence inapplicability of the Law of Identity). So that may force us to adopt a quantum logic instead, so our logic and maths will follow our metaphysics and physics because the other logic may simply not be up to the task of constructing a theory of the appropriate kind. Math is not divorced from the empirical, depending on what exactly you mean.

Consider the sentence, "'Snow' has four letters and is cold". Snow is mentioned, but that mention is not something that can be cold, only the snow itself is. So the "is cold" predication is a category mistake (specifically, a use-mention error). However we could apply an interpretive rule and say that in such circumstances, the "is cold" predication disquotes the mention and so is really saying that snow is cold. This would unpack as, "'Snow' has four letters and snow is cold". Such a rule would tolerate the above sentence and allow it to be truth-apt.

That's not really the sort of sentence I used. I didn't say the Liar was " 'This sentence' is false". "This sentence" cannot have the property of truth. But I think it's worse for your approach if you apply that interpretive rule. Then the expression just becomes the Liar sentence because the falsity-predicate disquotes the phrase "this sentence" and transforms it into " 'This sentence' is false is false and this sentence is false." That's just a conjunction of Liar Paradoxes.

Now compare that with "'2+2=4' has three numbers in it and is true". My claim is that the mention of '2+2=4' is not something that can be true, but the expression (or use) of '2+2=4' is. If so, then the truth-predication disquotes the mentioned expression and uses it. This would unpack as, "'2+2=4' has three numbers in it and 2+2=4".

I know that's the contention but you haven't explained why truth and falsity predicates are subject to a different set of rules than other predicates which can apply to quoted sentences. We both agree the expression that is quoted can be attributed truth. The difference seems to be (correct me if I'm wrong) that you think the following quote cannot be predicated truth while I think it can:

" '2+2=4' is true"

On your view, does this work? Can you predicate truth of a mentioned expression? I think you can, provided the mentioned expression is the sort of thing that can bear truth. Some mentions are truth-y, the expression mentioned just has to have the right kind of structure. The Liar has that structure. This solution is the same sort of solution Kripke tried and I don't think it works.

Since "This sentence is an English sentence" doesn't contain a truth-predicate, the referring expression is only mentioned, not used (i.e., only the surface aspects of the sentence are referred to). Whereas in the liar sentence, the truth-predication disquotes the mention and uses the referring expression. Thus it is cyclic.

OK, I think this runs into an issue I mentioned earlier to another user (assuming that user wasn't you, too lazy to check). Take the following:

This sentence is true.

Now that's an odd sentence, but it doesn't even have the appearance of a paradox, unlike the Liar. Under the rule you mentioned, it comes out as

"The sentence 'This sentence is true' is true and this sentence is true"

Well, that conjunction is obviously true under this interpretive rule, both conjuncts come out as true because the mentioned sentence is transformed into a use of the quoted expression. But that means that impredicative truth assignment cannot be sufficient to say the Liar is a category mistake. And note, Ryle specifically calls out impredication as the issue here (just look at the passage you quoted, he names "Impredicability").

Plantinga's argument is a valid argument, but it is unsound or at least disputable for a number of reasons. To the extent that Plantinga himself admitted recently that his argument doesn't really show anything.

"Alvin Plantinga’s Surprisingly Deflationary Take on his own Ontological Argument"

I hate to self-advertise (but I'll allow myself to since I don't do these things anymore), but a few years back I did a long friggin' video covering Plantinga's modal version of the OA, covering how the argument works and a number of possible (zing!) criticisms of the argument and of the typical atheist responses to the argument that I find silly:



(sorry for the occasionaly audio-video hiccup. I recall the rendering goofing up on me at that time)

Some interesting stuff. In my experience, the "X is self-evident" is asserted as a context-independent truth, that some things are literally impossible to deny if you actually understand what the terms mean. So not just in a debate or argument, but that some truths are simple inescapable.

Self-evidence of a claim has a dark mirror in the questions it seeks to silence.

You should put that on a mug. It sounds oddly profound, lol.

I don't know how you'd choose to have a choice without the entire enterprise devolving into an infinite "I chose to choose that I chose to choose, etc."

Exactly. Peterson and co. just treat the cause of suffering as being the fault of or caused by no one, or if anyone caused it it's the people who are being hurt by it caused it. Nope, there's no such thing as a prejudiced system wherein some people are given preference for reasons other than competency.

Well to be fair I goofed a bit. The Revenge Paradox is actually "This sentence is not true", which covers the meaningless case I gave, since "meaningless" falls under "not true".

But to take the meaningless case, it's simple why it's a Liar sentence for the same reason as the above (although I need to change it a bit since I think you're right). If "This sentence is either false or meaningless" is true, the sentence is both meaningless and true or true and false, which are contradictions. After all, presumably the point of labeling the Liar "meaningless" is to deny the Liar a truth-value so one can escape the situation where picking one truth-value gets you the other one too. But that means that it both lacks a truth-value (because it's meaningless) and is true (has a truth-value). Otherwise it's both true and false again. And if that sentence is itself meaningless, it's true and meaningless.

I don't really have much to say about Kant in general, I've scarcely read his works directly. :)

You've got this twisted. The "criticism" was simply that if indeed he believed the axioms of Euclidean Geometry were metaphysically necessary, then Non-Euclidean geometries seem to falsify this notion. So I don't understand why you brought up the historical matter of when such maths were developed. I wasn't criticizing him, I just said that (unless I'm missing something) his view on this matter was incorrect. So bringing up that Kant didn't specifically mention the parallel postulate is entirely beside the point since he was referencing the geometry of the day.

But the fact that Geometry was Euclidean Geometry at the time would suggest that he meant Euclidean Geometry, especially as (as you say) Euclid was considered synonymous with it. There was no other way of him to conceive of geometry at the time other than what we refer to as Euclidean Geometry. Granted, it's not as direct as his goof with syllogistic but I don't see how he could have referred to anything else.

I don't see how the parallel postulate in particular must be mentioned by Kant to count against his apparent view. Kant didn't mark out that postulate as being any less certain that the others, so I don't think one can say he was still correct in insisting EG as metaphysically certain. Interestingly - and it's a sadly not much explored topic outside 1 book and a few papers - you can have inconsistent geometries, dealing with things like Escher pictures and such.

Ryle is arguing against cyclic expressions (fillings of their own namely-riders), but he is not arguing against mentions of the referring expression (where quotation-marks have to be employed). As he says in the same paper:

The Liar isn't cyclic though. The subject of "This sentence is false" is the same as the subject of "This sentence is an English sentence".

Yes, an infinite expansion results if the subject is always a truth-evaluable expression (as is indicated with the nested brackets). But that's not how we ordinarily use that sentence. Instead the referring expression is only mentioned (which I unpacked and indicated with quotation-marks in my previous post), not used as an expression. That's the use-mention distinction.
As explained in my previous post, that specific use would result in a category mistake for the liar sentence, since a mention of the referring expression would not be truth predicable.

I don't follow you here. Both expressions have the same subject (the very sentence itself), so if the expansion occurs on one I can't see what feature doesn't cause it in the other. You say it's a use-mention error, but how so? Your rendering of the Liar came out as:

"The sentence 'This sentence is false' is false"
And then you concluded that

For the outer 'false' to be predicable of the inner sentence, the inner sentence must be an expression. But since it is only being mentioned, it doesn't support truth predication.

But this applies exactly the same to the "The sentence 'This sentence is an English sentence' is an English sentence". The inner sentence is only being mentioned, so is it a category mistake? I don't think it is. This is not a use-mention issue, the inner sentence is capable of being true even if it's only being mentioned. "2+2=4" is true, for example. Your rendering of the Liar is fine for my purposes though. If "This sentence is false" is a false sentence, then it is also a true sentence and that's the contradiction!

That's fine. There's nothing wrong with nested expressions. The problems only arise with cyclic expressions.

I don't follow you here. The sentence is structured no differently. What makes one a nested sentence while the other commits a use-mention error?

The issue as I see it is not impredication, but whether the sentences in question have a truth-apt use.

But your quote of Ryle said that the issue was the use of impredicative definitions:

The same inattention to grammar is the source of such paradoxes as 'the Liar ', 'the Class of Classes ...' and 'Impredicability'. — Gilbert Ryle

A far as I can tell, Ryle's argument is that the sin of the Liars family of paradoxes is that they make use of impredicative definitions, they are part of the thing they are defining, and that by doing this you can never get down to a truth-apt sentence because it the subject expands indefinitely.

"This sentence is an English sentence" would ordinarily be unpacked as, "The sentence 'This sentence is an English sentence' is an English sentence". The inner sentence is not being used as an expression but is only being mentioned. If it were used as an expression, then infinite recursion would result.

That's not how Ryle's analyzed the Liar though. His claim is that the impredication never gets anywhere, and so when run against "This sentence is an English sentence", it would, when you ask for the "namely-rider" come out (as per your Ryle's quote): "Namely, the current sentence{namely, the current sentence etc. That supposedly unbridgeable gap to the verb is, on Ryle's account the problem and impredication is his diagnosis of the cause.

Now consider a similar unpacking for the liar sentence, "The sentence 'This sentence is false' is false". For the outer 'false' to be predicable of the inner sentence, the inner sentence must be an expression. But since it is only being mentioned, it doesn't support truth predication. So it's a category mistake. Whether a category mistake or an infinite recursion, no truth-apt use is available for the liar sentence.

That's not Ryle's analysis then, at least not from what you quoted (Ryle's said that the sentence cannot even get to the verb, so the inner sentence would expand indefinitely when you try to identify the subject). Your analysis here doesn't make sense to me. Try this: "The sentence 'Snow is white is true' is true". The inner sentence is clearly true, we can predicate truth there. If "snow is white" is true, we can validly assert that "The sentence 'snow is white is true' is a true sentence". The outer sentence is just the metalanguage to the object language of the inner sentence. Ironically enough, doing this in natural language allows for Liar sentences to be validly formed (as per Tarski), because you used English as both the metalanguage and the object language.

No problem.

I believe Kant did as I said, though as with you, I'm relying on a secondary source (and potentially worse, my hazy recollection of that source). Mostly, I find it plausible that my memory is correct here since Kant also made a similar sort of assertion (that turned out to be wrong) about Aristotelian Logic ("we have no need for more logicians", the century before we got Classical Logic, lol) and something similar about biology. Maybe I have a poor recollection and that has colored my view of Kant.

The same inattention to grammar is the source of such paradoxes as 'the Liar ', 'the Class of Classes ...' and 'Impredicability' (Ryle)
[..]
Thus the liar sentence is not truth-apt. It doesn't actually assert anything

So the issue is with impredication (what I earlier called self-predication), which is how I construed this resolution earlier. I don't think this works for a number of reasons. The sentence "The tallest person in this room" is just as impredicative as the Liar, as its subject depends on a set of which it is itself a member. Or even just take my earlier example, "This sentence is an English sentence." Ryle's solution makes that sentence a nonsense sentence, since we run into his so-called "name-rider problem":

"This sentence is an English sentence."
What sentence?
"The current sentence {The current sentence [The current sentence...

This is just as is impredicative as the Liar (the only difference is the predicate they put onto themselves), and so as with Russell's version of type theory, this renders scores of seemingly comprehensible sentences into nonsense. And I suspect this is why Ryle's solution isn't mentioned very often nowadays since it eliminates self-reference entirely.

I would say that over time the hierarchy always shifts towards competency. This doesn't mean that there cannot be cases, some of them even for hundreds of years, when incompetent people maintain positions of power. That is quite frequent - look at Justin Trudeau - no competency, he's there just because of his father.

Many people look at things in this way, but it's just a short-term thing. It's not sustainable - and when I say sustainable, I'm referring to the fact that it's not sustainable over many generations.

Regarding the concrete example you provided. Statistically, people may stay within their income bracket, but that isn't what interests me. What interests me is the possibility of moving from one income bracket to another. That isn't something that you can assess statistically because it presupposes that all people (or at least most people) are willing to do what it takes and desire to move from one income bracket to another. And of course, this just isn't true. Most people grow comfortable in their income bracket over time, and this is a personal observation I've made.

How do you know the hierarchy "shifts towards competency"? You didn't really answer my question, you just told me what you believe is the case. How is incompetency unsustainable? This isn't the interplay of man vs wild, where failure means death, so I don't know what you're appealing to to justify this belief. The political process is not remotely free of nepotism.

Well it should interest you because it suggests that success isn't fully determined by competency. Like I hate to use a cliche example, but Trump is mega rich, as was his father (not to mention the question of just how much he actually improved his finances after his inheritance). His extreme affluence is directly a result of what his parents had.

I never said competency entails privilege. But competency naturally translates in greater power to influence your surrounding environment. That's why things fell apart in the Eastern Soviet bloc, because people were promoted solely based on political connections and ideological reasons, and not on competence. Such a structure cannot survive in the long-run.

Bro, you literally said that competency entails privilege:

Yes, the Marxists claim that the bourgeoisie maintain a certain social and economic structure because they are the ones who have power, and since it benefits them, they use their power in that direction. But as Peterson explains in the video, it's not power, but competency, that allows them to be the privileged social class. There is a hierarchy, hierarchies cannot be eliminated, and that hierarchy is based on competency. The bourgeois are at the top because they have shown themselves to be the most competent at taking care of their society.

Which sounds hopelessly naive for reasons I went over before.

Yeah, I excluded it because corruption is a problem and needs to be addressed separately from whether or not someone is successful in their business. Someone can be successful without being corrupt.

Except, as the example I gave shows, the corruption is at least in part how businesses become more successful. If bribing political officials under the hilarious moniker of "campaign financing" to net economic moves beneficial to the business in question isn't corruption assisting success, I don't know what it. The point isn't that success is impossible sans-corruption, the point is the most successful businesses are usually the ones who fuel corruption for their own ends, meaning it's not all (or even mostly) competency based. Your response to corruption just ends up being a choice to ignore the counter-examples to your view.

How naive. Naturally, when challenged, the claim is asserted by proponents to be innocently descriptive, but not a single person who uses it fails to either implicitly or explicitly advance various prescriptive claims.

-Yawn- OK. It's a great way to insulate your position from falsity by impugning the motives and declare what they actually intend beforehand. Neat.

Isn't the issue that Kant elevated the postulates of Euclidean geometry to the level of a metaphysical certitude, and the Non-Euclidean Geometry shows that such a position is not the case?

JFK assassination. At least that is a thing that happens and (depending on how this conspiracy is outlined) doesn't require one to completely overturn what they think they know.

You nailed it, lol.

To believe in and invoke white privilege is the polite, academic way to be a racist against white people. I haven't watched the video, but inasmuch as Peterson makes this claim, which I have heard him make in other videos, he is absolutely right.

To echo you, that is bullshit on stilts. How can you say that with a straight face?

Saying "Group X generally has certain advantages (often even when measurable competencies are taken into account) and are given preferences at least in part because of what makes them a member of Group X" is not politely or in any other way being racist to white people.

I think you are largely misrepresenting the idea of privilege in this case. Just as a first point, you take aim at "leftist sociologists and political scientists", and it seems to me that such people (especially sociologists) are precisely in the business of analyzing society at a broader level for its properties, tendencies, distributions of various kinds, and so on. Comparing that, as you repeatedly did, to a personal example of your own (which doesn't reflect the tendencies in, say, American society as a whole) is just a poor comparison.

People who make use of the concept of privilege don't argue that people of some specified privileged class don't face issues, or that particular members of that class don't have bad circumstances (even bad circumstances rooted in their (broadly) advantageous class membership). Rather, they're pointing out a general advantage and preference society gives to certain members, even before they could have ever demonstrated their superior competency or whatever (think: job offer preferences depending on perceived ethnicity or race of the applicants name, for example)


And what makes Peterson's argument hilarious (and where I think your point has some merit) is that being poor can negate much of one's privilege, and conversely, being wealthy or rich can overturn much of one's lack of it. This is a point I often see Marxists make, which is why this thread's OP (and linked video) is so stupid in its insistence in lumping together "the left" and the various ideas and beliefs held by those within various different ideologies that make up the left. Modern feminism is not an off-shoot of Marxism, Marxists are not "3rd-wave feminists". Oh feminists do make some of the same points as Marxists (and vice-versa), but what they believe and why they believe it are largely distinct. Anita Sarkeesian is a favorite complaint among those who despise 3rd-wave feminists, and she has asserted that capitalism plays a role in these issues. But many other such feminists never assert this, they just talk about these other sociological issues but do not connect them to the economic system of the day.

What they both have in common is that the full sentence appears truth-apt (since it has a subject and a predicate) until, of course, the content of the sentence is analyzed and the subject is found to not support the predication. It's a category mistake (as Michael earlier noted).

I agree that your example is a category mistake, but that's because it's trying to predicate truth on an object which cannot bear it, whereas sentences (such as what the Liar refers to) are arguably truth-bearers, so your analogy seems flawed.

Then we are using "grounded" in a different way. I mean that the subject is resolved and supports the predication, whatever it may be. In this case, the subject doesn't support the grounded predication and so the sentence isn't truth-apt. (BTW, this was essentially Gilbert Ryle's solution to the liar-style sentences rather than Kripke's.)

Then this does appear to be a rejection of self-reference (I'm not familiar with Ryle's attempt at resolving it). But it seems spurious since it's treating truth and falsity predicates differently than other predicates. No one denies that "This sentence has five words" or "This sentence is in English" by saying the predicates cannot be supported. These seem to be sentences, and if sentences are the correct objects to bear truth I'm not sure how Ryle's solution addresses that. There's also Quine's formulation (which lacks the demonstrative "this") which I think was a response to Strawson:

"yields a falsehood when proceeded by its negation" yield a falsehood when proceeded by its negation.

Self-reference is generally fine. For example, "this sentence has ten words". The truth or falsity of this doesn't depend on the subject being truth-apt, only that its words can be counted. That is a valid predication and so the sentence is truth-apt.

But the point I was making was that both sentences are constructed the same, the only difference is their respective predicates. The subject of each sentence makes reference to a sentence (themselves) and applies some predicate to them. The predicate "has X words" is allowed, what distinguishes that from "is false"?

If you agree the sentence is ungrounded, that entails that it is true, which contradicts being ungrounded.
— MindForged

It doesn't entail that since the sentence doesn't support truth predication (because, in turn, the subject of the sentence doesn't support grounded predication). But you're treating it as if it does.

But why doesn't it support it? And also, "grounded" isn't a truth-predicate. Prior you said that ungrounded sentences are meaningless, yes? "This sentence is ungrounded" is not applying a truth-predicate to itself, it merely asserts (as the solution purports) that it's ungrounded (which means it's true). And since it doesn't make reference to a truth-predicate it seems like that objection is flawed.

It has been rather interesting the last several years watching all this hullabaloo about the end of America (or of freedom in America) because of political movements on college campuses and how that points to a spreading rot in society (naturally this can only apply to left-wing ideologues). Or something like that.

I find it's often instructive to see who are the thought leaders for these kinds of things; pretty much always people benefiting from it directly (book sales, talks, cachet in their movement etc.) or indirectly (attention). It doesn't mean they don't believe it, and it doesn't mean what they're saying is false. What it means is you should treat what they say for what it's worth: inherently suspect.

I think Kripke grants that the liar sentence is a meaningful assertion but that it just lacks a truth value (and so therefore has some third value). Whereas I am claiming that the liar sentence isn't a meaningful assertion at all because it fails to meet the logical criteria for one. A bit like the sentence "the tree is false".

Kripke is the one who came up with this groundedness solution as far as I know, you seem to have presented his analysis of it. It is not stated to have a 3rd value, it's interpreted as a failure of the Law of the Excluded Middle. And that comparison seems disanalogous. Trees don't even have the appearance of a truth-apt object, whereas even you seem to agree that the Liars at least appear as if they are truth-apt.

That sentence fails for the same reason as the liar sentence. We can all agree that that sentence is ungrounded. But, being ungrounded, the sentence itself doesn't meet the logical criteria required for a meaningful assertion. So you can't then treat it as if it does.

That is, the sentence appears to be asserting something about itself. But it is not, despite surface appearances. Whereas our assertions about the sentence are truth-apt as long as we're not asserting that the sentence is true or false.

That is the sense in which the liar, truth-teller and revenge paradoxes are like a mirage. There appears to be water there, and it makes us think about water, but appearances are sometimes deceiving. There's no water there.

No no, the notion of groundedness refers to, essentially, hacking off the truth-predicate. The predicate "is grounded" (and its negation) aren't truth predicates so it's not subject to the same criticism, unless you are arguing that self-reference is itself not an allowed thing to do in language. If you agree the sentence is ungrounded, that entails that it is true, which contradicts being ungrounded. This is why Kripke's solution isn't very popular nowadays (even if there is much to commend about his attempt). If our assertions about the sentence are truth-apt there is no functional difference between the sentence referring to itself and saying exactly what we say about it. Kripke, who developed this resolution, also agreed that his solution is probably subject to the revenge paradox I gave.

They aren't mirages, they're contradictions (I showed a rendition of the argument earlier in the thread). Also, the truth teller isn't really a paradox.

Well said.

I think I agree. The article does say the Liar cannot be expressed in a strongly self-referential language. So any language the Liar appears is not "strongly-semantically-self-representational". That's why Tarski (as per the article) thought the Liar was a reductio of such expressively powerful languages, to the extent that he argued that natural languages were in fact inescapably incoherent and should be replaced with similar but formal languages which avoid such paradoxes. However, I do not agree that the point is the Liar is meaningless or cannot be expressed. It depends on how expressive the language is. If it's "strongly-semantically-self-representational" then it's not expressive enough to make a Liar.

Sure, the point is that it's a lie. There is no state of affairs as Marxism describes it.

You know, I get into this same kind of silly nonsense when I see a naive Marxist making an argument. Just asserting the thing doesn't make it so. "Well my opposition is just espousing a lie" is not convincing tbh.

Yes, the Marxists claim that the bourgeoisie maintain a certain social and economic structure because they are the ones who have power, and since it benefits them, they use their power in that direction. But as Peterson explains in the video, it's not power, but competency, that allows them to be the privileged social class. There is a hierarchy, hierarchies cannot be eliminated, and that hierarchy is based on competency. The bourgeois are at the top because they have shown themselves to be the most competent at taking care of their society. In a way, excluding at the moment corruption, the way to get rich is by selling a lot of goods to a lot of people - which means adding value to the world, giving people what they want.

Again, that's interesting and all, but have you never considered possible objections to your view? Just off the top of my head from what you said there, I can think of a few:

-How do you know the hierarchy is based on competency? Most people stay within their income bracket (and near where there parents were). So it could be that nearly everyone is incompetent, but it seems more likely that those who held power (whether political or economic) in the past has a strong relationship with who has it in the future. I'll just let you know that white people did not eliminate nepotism, not from politics nor in economics.

-Even if it is in fact the case that hierarchies cannot be eliminated, that does not entail that no specific hierarchy cannot be eliminated. Nor does competency need to entail privilege unless you are just something like social Darwinist ("those who succeed are the ones who are competent" seems to fit the bill)


-So wait, you do acknowledge the existence of the Bourgeoisie??? Marxists define (it's not the full definition) that as the class which by whatever means necessary perpetuates their ownership of the means of production.

-Oh, lol, so we just exclude corruption? Hm, I guess when businesses (all of the most successful of which) sprinkle campaign donations on dozens of politicians we can just exclude that as counting against the idea of them being competent (otherwise they needn't manipulate the political process to their benefit by using their money).

You're just positing a naive and even ad hoc view. Counter-examples to your assertions are dismissed by fiat. As I said before, pure sophistry.

I don't have time to do a proper response at this moment but just a note. You said the quote was from a different article but you literally linked the same Wiki article (and even the same section) as I did. Maybe I misunderstood your newest post (I did have to skim it), but too busy at work, lol.

With regards to Marx's theories, Peterson takes the underlying fault to be the fact that he pits the proletariat against the bourgeois, making one into the oppressed and the other into the oppressor. This sort of language is precisely what allows all faults and sufferings of the world to be cast at the feet of the oppressors - they are responsible, that's why the world is bad. Whereas Peterson's point is that life is suffering, and we are not responsible for that - it's just the nature of life.

Oh that's just nonsense. I'm not a Marxist (anymore; we all have our oddities at uni), but the fact that in Marxism the bourgeois are against the proletariat (and thus one the oppressor & the other oppressed) is not mere language, it's intended to make an assertion about the actual state of affairs. Whining about the language of it is exactly the kind of weaseling complaint that conservatives lay at the feet of liberals ("Why don't you just say what it is?")

And then to justify rejecting this assertion about the relationship between 2 defined classes on the basis that "life is suffering" is pure sophism. The claim in Marxism is not that "all faults and sufferings in the world" are the fault of the bourgeois, but rather that a number of social and economic ills are largely caused and maintained by the bourgeois because it maintains their style of life, and is even necessary for them to live as they do. Claiming that no one is responsible for economic disparities - not even the people (according to Marxists, the bourgeois) who create and guide and maintain the laws and relationships the engender these disparities - is just an attempt to avoid responsibility (somewhat ironic since leftists are often given this charge by those on the right).

You said that "True(x)" and "x" have the same truth value. I assume "True(x)" means "'x' is true"? So "'x' is true" and "x" have the same truth value. Which means that "'x' is true" is true iff "x" is true.

But the T-schema is saying more than this. It's trying to explain what it means to have a truth-value.

I don't know if it means that, because notice how the T-schema is setup:

True(x) <=> x

If it were simply to explain the meaning if truth within logic, wouldn't the equality sign be used (such statements are in some sense metalogical)? The T-schema uses a biconditional (an operator within a logical system), which just means the proposition and the proposition predicated as true have the same truth-value. After all, it goes both ways. "True(x) <=> x" and "x <=> True(x)". In a sense, they are the same, but really I think it's simply that they are inter-derivable.

Marxist Lie of White Privilege???

Apparently the left-wing political ideologies are this brute mush that are the same thing and composed of people who assume and argue the same things. Useful way to (mis)construe your opponents, maybe I should start doing likewise.

The T-schema is an attempt to define truth. What do we mean when we say that a sentence is true? To say that "'T' is true" is true if "T" is true, which you are claiming is what the T-schema is saying, doesn't answer this question.

Um, that's not what I said, even in your quote of me. I said:

I took the T-schema and so said that "True(x)" has the same truth-value as just asserting that "x".

IOW, that 'x' and "True(x)" are logically equivalent, they have the same logical value/truth-value according to the T-schema. That seems indistinguishable from what you said so I don't follow what you're saying here, we said the same thing as far as I can tell.

But take a sentence like "this sentence is true". We can use the T-schema to say that "'this sentence is true' is true" means "this sentence is true", but what does "this sentence is true" mean? Unlike "it is raining", we can't refer to some empirical state of affairs. The "is true" in "this sentence is true" isn't saying anything. Just as the "is false" in "this sentence is false" isn't saying anything. Truth-predication in these cases is a category error.

"This sentence is true" under the T-schema would be logically equivalent to saying the sentence is the case: True(x) <=> x

The same for the Liar under the T-schema. The sentence "This sentence is false (or untrue)" is logically equivalent (same truth-value) to the previous is the case: ~True(x) <=> x

Isn't this simply the Tarski Undefinability Theorem?

Yes, but it doesn't ever give you a grounded truth-apt subject. To determine the truth of the liar sentence first requires determining the truth of the subject ("This sentence"). That requires substitution with the original liar sentence and so on ad infinitum. There is no final truth-apt subject to ground the liar sentence.

That's just assuming the Kripke's solution and it fails for the same reason. This notion of groundedness can be just as easily used to restate the paradox:

This sentence is ungrounded.

Which must be true as per the original Liar, and thus is true and not grounded. Or else it's false and not grounded. Or else we must say that this notion of groudedness does not do the work you would need it to, because it still throws up the contradiction in the "revenge" paradoxes. The predicate "is false" must be part of the project of determining the truth of the Liar sentence, otherwise your only recourse seems to be assuming that self-reference isn't an allowed move.

So the liar sentence fails to assert anything about a truth-apt subject and so isn't itself truth-apt. If you disagree, then what do you think is being asserted?

What's being asserted is that the sentence itself (falsity predicate included) is not the case.

Are you sure it can do that validly? The linked page states the lemma with a premise that restricts it to first-order languages, which I expect would rule out its use in a T-schema environment which I believe is higher order.

I was going to check the proof to see if that premise is actually used, but I got tired and didn't, so I'm hoping maybe somebody else did. It would be unusual to state a premise that was not used though.

I admit I'm too lazy (and busy, about to go to work) to check, so I just jumped on Wiki real quick and it seems to say the same:

Tarski proved a stronger theorem than the one stated above, using an entirely syntactical method. The resulting theorem applies to any formal language with negation, and with sufficient capability for self-reference that the diagonal lemma holds. First-order arithmetic satisfies these preconditions, but the theorem applies to much more general formal systems.