The Liberal Party doesn't do science.

No surprises there.

If the man with ten coins in his pocket is Jones, they are extensionally identical.

And it's different to a man with ten coins in his pocket.

So again, far more detailed analysis is needed.


I'm traveling, so doing this somewhat sporadically. I'll try to get the rest of the reply to Vranas’ Objection down before I go further with your interesting aside. But thanks.

The changes are I think pretty transparent. Definitions 13, 14 and 15 just change the account from individual sentences to sets of sentences. The greater emphasis on satisfaction is welcome, making clear the bypassing of intentional logics. (Here I have in mind a brief critique form Kit Fine, which seems tangential if not irrelevant).

Theorem 16 applies this to particular sets of sentences. The structure of the argument is familiar. Then Definition 17 uses this to set up Premise-relative particularity.

That's a bit shorter than the previous versions, but it'll do.

And somehow that deleted my re-write of the Response to Vranas’ Objection, again. :grimace:

Again, the detail is going to make or break any case here.

But "I have ten coins in my pocket and I will get the job" and "The man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job" are extensional identical. That is, they are satisfied by the exact same state.

So for the purposes of any extensional model we might use, the two propositions do meant the same thing.

The difference, if there is one, must be between "I know that p" and "I have a justified true belief that p". A case might be that P is persistent, but that there is a gap between P being justified and believed and P's being known. But that would have to be demonstrated. But where - the move form indexical to description - first to third person?

Good to hear form you, . Sorry, I missed your post yesterday.

Yours is a quite interesting question. There might be some potential to use Russell's work to at least show something about the relation between JTB and knowledge. But Russell's account is about truth (satisfaction), and the two Gettier cases are both true and valid. So I don't think it applies directly. that is, a JTB is always true, as is a piece of knowledge, and so formally a JTB always entails knowledge.

There might be something we could do in the detail, though. Ona. quick look I can't quite see how to make it work, although Claud somewhat disagree. Instead, I wonder if the upshot might be to show some of the problems with Gettier accounts more clearly.

Being true is persistent, yet both belief and justification are fragile; more information might change them. But is knowledge persistent or fragile? Or neither? Or both? And is the error then to treat knowledge as if it were persistent when it is fragile?

What you've done is shown how Russell's approach might have unexpected application.

Damn. That reply to Un deleted my next bit of exposition.

Nice. This plays well into my dislike of "objective" and "subjective", a dichotomy I think causes far more problems than it solves. Part of the problem is that folk think in terms of objective and subjective objects, a nonsense that might be partially replaced by thinking in terms of objects and processes.

I'm not at all sure what that was about, but I enjoyed it anyway.

Natural languages will always have more to them than can bee shown in a formal language. Indeed it might be good to think of formal languages as just one part of natural languages. What formal language can do is to set out a bit more clearly how the bits of language might relate to each other.

...socialist... — bert1

:scream:

I entirely agree. We will do much better if we look to the use of "belief" rather than stipulate definitions. Or nuts.

It might be wise for you to back off a bit, . @Jamal has access to the private conversation.

For a brief shining time, in the seventies, there was a Commonwealth Tertiary Education Assistance Scheme Downunder that provided means-tested living allowances to students undertaking their first undergraduate degree. The intent was to make higher education accessible regardless of socioeconomic background — students didn’t have to pay tuition, and TEAS helped cover living costs while studying.

Similar schemes are apparently run now in Norway, Germany and Denmark.

Skim a little off that ridiculous trillion-dollar pay package and it could be done in your neck of the woods.

It's not economics, it's a choice.

....inject yourself yet again to spew false, defamatory, unsubstantiated, and spiteful comments about me. — Bob Ross

Edit: Didn't meant to post that. Happened while I was copying into a PM chat. But I'll leave it here, to show that Bob has misread who said what.

I'm out. Too heated.


Added, by way of explanation for anyone who cares:

Bob Ross accused me of "injecting" myself "yet again" and had me "spew false, defamatory, unsubstantiated, and spiteful comments about me".

This is there in black and white.

I replied here:

Since you accuse me of false and defamatory comments in the thread, I've marked it for mod attention. They can let us know if I've over stepped.
— Banno

Bob Ross accused me. Be clear about that. I asked for adjudication; be clear about that. The following is a falsehood:

I want it to be on the public record here that Banno just told me that they reported me for defamatory comments for this response I just gave.
— Bob Ross

I did not report Bob Ross for making defamatory comments. I reported myself, because he accused me of making such comments.

A misreading is one thing. Bob failing to recognises his error and continuing the falsehood is quite another.

Not bad. You probably believe that there are bacteria in the grunge under your left little toe nail, but hadn't considered it until now. Is that "precious stuff protected by a barrier"?

Not the grunge, the belief.

At it's most basic, having a belief is just holding that some statement is true.

What your analogy perhaps gets right is that this is not a simple binary relation, but that the statement is the content of the belief. So Lous Lane can believe that Clark Kent wears glasses without thereby believing the Superman wears glasses.

The idea that a belief is precious is a step too far.

I'm still not very happy with this. — J

Nor should you be. There is certainly more going on here. But what we can do is set out some minimal requirement, and at the very least we do say for some sentences that we ought do as they say.

What we might be looking for is a way to clearly articulate what can be done consistently with at least these sentences.

But there's more here, of course. Hare pointed out that formal logic treats of statements that are true or false, but here we are dealign with imperatives sand proscriptive sentences. There are a number of options open to Russell, perhaps the simplest of which is to pars the imperative as a statement, such that "It ought to be that p"; so from "Alice ought hang her coat on a blue hook" we get "It ought be that Alice hangs her coat on a blue hook".

it is a point to consider.

A bigot is obstinate. They have not entered into the conversation in order to engage in earnest dialogue. They are not going to change their mind as a result of a rational discussion.

There is a point at which further engaging with bigotry is doing no more than providing them with a platform, or the walls to their echo chamber.

Daryl Davis’s method wasn’t the one seen here. He didn't meet racist propositions with counter-propositions, as though the problem were a matter of epistemic error.

Rather, he dissolved the framework within which those propositions took hold. The racist belief “Black people are less intelligent”, that Black people are somehow other, less human, or outside the circle of empathy was undermined by his calm, articulate, personable, unmistakable humanity. He invalidated the tacit presupposition on which the racist attitude rested.

So the simplistic distinction between “bigoted” and “non-bigoted” believers misses what Davis did. Such beliefs are not neutral cognitive contents that may or may not be held bigotedly. They are modes of dehumanisation. By being human, Davis undermined the core anger of bigotry.

That same hateful attitude can be seen in this thread, from the petty disparaging of the tom boy to the outright perdition of the homosexual. The anecdotal accounts of compromised transgender folk are pathetic, given the profuse accounts of transgender folk being ostracised by their community.

The content of this thread is bigoted. For me, the point has been reached at which further discussion is inappropriate.

Russells response is to move from individual sentences to sets of sentences. Is that justified?

I think so. To start with, an argument is a set of sentences. Consider the example "If Alice is a first-year, then she ought to hang her coat on one of the blue hooks." On it's own, this is invalid. It needs an additional premise: All first-years ought hang their coats on the blue hooks".

Is this justified for Hume's Law? Consider the ubiquitous quote from whence it came:

...when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. — Hume, Treatise, Bk. III, Pt. I, §1

It's clearly about sets of sentences.

Entailment is a characteristic not of individual sentences, but of sets of sentences. And Russell is concerned with barriers to entailment. Hence she is concerned with sets of sentences.

So I think we can grant that what might look as if it is an ad hoc reaction to a criticism is instead an adjustment that follows form the context.

Seems like you're trying to insinuate something here. — javra

No, just wordplay, with a slight hangover from another conversation about Harry. Too obtuse, it seems. Not to worry. The point was that you and I will have trouble recognising how we are deceiving ourselves, especially without intervention from others. Easier to see it in others; but then, what we see is never the whole story.

Indeed, going back to the topic of the OP, I'd question whether there even is a whole story.

So, and this by way of a critique of my own account, the piecemeal, coherent, approach might turn out to be less "adaptive" than a complete account that is incoherent. And it might be that those who adopt a complete, incoherent account are unable to see the inconsistency. Consider Christian theology, for example. Or any of a number of recent threads.

I blame @Jamal for having me read Adorno. The "respect for the suffering of particular beings that are "crushed" by universalising systems..." there runs parallel to my OP here, at least for me.

So I'll leave you to swap lyrics and poems. Myth. Don't be concerned about going off topic here - that happened twenty pages ago.

You have got to be behind her if you are going to stab her in the back.

And so to Vrana's objection.

One of the ways of setting out a obligation in first order logic os to simply incorporate an opperator, O. Op is then just "One ought p" This has the advantage of simplicity, Humes rule being the brief remark that there can be no valid inference form φ to Oψ, φ being some statement concerning what is the case, Oψ some statement as to what ought be the case.

Following Russell's strategy, we'd be looking to perhaps show that φ was preserved, while Oψ was fragile, and hence no entailment relation can hold between them. φ → Oψ, then, is mixed, and so in the scheme of things, neither descriptive nor normative.

φ → Oψ is neither preserved nor fragile.

Now the General Barrier Theorem says roughly that no set of satisfiable sentences , each of which is preserved, entails a sentence which is fragile. It is about sentences that are either preserved or fragile.

Vrana's objection is that since φ → Oψ is neither preserved nor fragile, the General Barrier Theorem says nothing about it. So on this account, the Barrier Theorem tells us nothing about Hume's Law... but that's what we wanted!

And the second horn of the dilemma. Suppose we go along with the criticism, and strengthen our barrier to entailment so that no "is" statement can result in φ → Oψ; then we have ~φ ⊨ φ → Oψ; but that is exactly what we do not want! If we strengthen it enough to avoid Vrana's criticism, then it's demonstrably false.

...your account is somewhat overly simplistic for me — javra

Sure. There's plenty more going on, including no small amount of self-deception. But not with you and I of course, only with them. And is it maladaptive? For that, we have @Jamal as arbiter.

It's always more complicated, yep.

I'd more or less go along with Davidson here, as a default position. Se the paragraph in his bio on problems of irrationality. The second-order belief idea is immune to empirical analysis. But our minds can be "weakly partitioned". One might believe p and believe ~p while never believing (p & ~p). That would be demonstrable: and that's a part of why setting stuff out explicitly and sharing with others is so useful.

A more difficult question might be whether such inconsistent beliefs are maladaptive.

We are in the main made aware that we are lying to ourselves by the discrepancy between what we say is the case and what others say is the case. The private language argument at play again. And my point that reasoning is fundamentally public.

, it is unexpected for me because it seems to be more an issue for psychology than philosophy.

Or am I missing something here... philosophically, self-deception is inadvisable, but psychologically, it might be the appropriate approach.

No one important.

:gasp:

Harry could never get past seeing language as nothing but reference, which made his posts somewhat monotonous and off-point. But I pretty much concur with his critique of @apokrisis. :wink:

As I've said elsewhere, were I running this forum there would be far fewer members and more esoteric threads, which would be much less fun. That the forum exists at all is quite astonishing.

It's Jamal's forum. He will do as he sees fit. The most we lesser creatures may do is to be grateful we are permitted the occasional whinge, as in this very thread. And if you don't like it, there's the door.

Thanks for pointing to Hack's essay. The brief historical account of recent formal logic was particularly amusing in its account of Davidson's program, fuzzy logic and relevant logic, as were her comments on gender - Notable that the two most interesting logicians around at present are women.

I've never been keen on "foundherentism", an ugly name. But there is much to be said for the core idea that something must be taken as granted, while the overall structure of our beliefs ought be coherent. I'm also not too keen on "hypothetico-deductive method". The missing piece in Hack's account seems to m to be that our reasoning is public, that experimental evidence is shared, and so embedded in our common understanding. But I can agree with her that neither Old Deferentialism nor New Cynicism, nor indeed some synthesis of the two, gives a sufficient account of science or rationality considered more generally.

Nor do I go along with her rejection of statistical approaches, which appears to be based on treating probabilities of propositions being true, rather then of their being believable. Though of course if the aim is truth, then Bayesian thinking will not help.

Now I've not read Hack closely, so I may be quite mistaken here. There is it appears some agreement between the pluralism Hack advocates and the piecemeal approach suggested in my OP.

It's a good list. We might start a thread on each, and have endless fun...

In pondering the next part of the essay, I've come across How to Prove Hume’s Law, a more recent paper.

That paper was downloaded 300 time last month. Seems topical.

Down the rabbit hole.

A sentence with a tense operator does not automatically become about that temporal location. Pp ⊨ FPp is about p, not the future (or the past). — J

Not quite since, FPp might tell us something that will be true in the future - that the past will not have changed; so it is also about the past. It's this lack of being definitely about the future or definitely about the past that Russell brings out. It's a bit of both, fragile in some models, preserved in others.

Similar attempts to standardize ordinary-language uses of "ought" also have failed, as far as I know. — J

There are various ways to formalise ought. The simplest is just to adopt an operator "Oρ", roughly "we ought ρ". Whether they fail or not depends on what one is doing with them. The advantage of formalising language is that the consistency of what we say is made clear. There is more than one way to formalise "ought", each perhaps brining to the fore a different aspect. I wouldn't count this as a "failure". The task for Russell is to find an account that can avoid question begging.

Is this chain of reasoning valid? — ucarr

Back at the beginning, you presumed that there was someone asking a question. So it's no surprise that you can conclude that someone exists.

Asking a question presumes the questioner. Sure.

That's not demonstrating that something exists, so much as presuming it.

Which one must do, anyway. That there is stuff is still no more than a brute fact.

So we have a lesson about the difference between illocutionary force and propositional content.

Cool.

The conclusion of the OP, that all belief is irrational, remains self-defeating.

What happened here is that Millard noted that we may have irrational thoughts (his step 2 and 3) then equated thinking and believing (step one) and concluded that all our beliefs are irrational (step 4)

It's just a confusion.

Yep. "While that might explain the motive, it doesn't resolve the incoherence".

Thanks, but don't feel obligated. This is as much. or more, me writing my own notes as it is seeking comment. I want a clear idea of how the logic relates to Hume's Law, so I'm working through the article far too meticulously for most folk. I'm not at all surprised this hasn't garnered much attention.

Of course, comments and criticism is welcome.

You kind of smuggled in anal sex here — Bob Ross

Goodness - without consent? I hope not.

Oh, Bob.

"Sex" and "gender" can be used to differentiate between those characteristics that are biological and those that are social. — Banno

Russell now moves on to considering another application of the barrier to entailment, that of the impossibility of deriving an ought from an is. The main problem faced here is the lack of a widely accepted formalisation of deontic logic. We don't have a settled semantics for "ought".

(It might be worth pointing out here that deontic here is not much related to the "deontic" that is so often contrasted with utilitarianism and virtue ethics, as concerning absolute moral rules. "Deontic" here means to do with ought, not necessarily to do with moral rules. So it includes utilitarianism, virtue ethics and other ethical systems)

Russell noted right back in the introductory paragraph that she does not actually present a section on Hume's Law, but rather is building towards it.

What is needed in order to apply Russell's account is a set of sentences that are fixed, and a set of sentences that switch. The obvious candidates here are for the fixed statements, those that concern what is the case, and for the switching statements, those that concern what ought be the case. Descriptive sentences would be preserved under normative switching, normative sentences would be fragile. Which is just to say that there are different normative approaches to any fixed description of how things are.

But there is a sense in which this is already to assume Hume's law. To define what we ought do as fragile is to presume that it is distinct from what is the case, that we can clearly seperate normative sentences from descriptive sentences.

The danger is that Russell presumes rather than demonstrates Hume's law. In which case she will have provided a powerful way for us to talk about deontic logic but not have settled the issue.

I've answered that.

Repeatedly.

...purely... — Bob Ross

Were'd that come from?