Here it is again: A refusal to recognise the answer when it is set out before them.

It reeks of some sort of anti-intellectualism, or at least anti-expertise.

Explains a lot of recent politics, too.

True enough.

Your problem is that you simply don't understand the concept of infinity — ssu

More than that, there seems also to be a resistance to learning about infinity - hence flimsy response "If all the rooms are filled you can't move 1 to 2 and 3 to room 4 because all the infinite rooms are already filled". Notice how the OP, which has a relatively simple answer, was exploded into quantum nonsense and "dimensions and contrivances" with such glee, within a few posts of the OP?

Folk don't want an answer...

So what is it they want?

Moral rules don't help normal people. They exist for the soul purpose of condemnation. Only those who were born to condemn care about moral realism. — frank

Morality is not algorithmic.

Same answer for . There's no criteria, like virtue ethics or capability framework, that will work in all cases for all questions; and yet we have to do the evaluation, so we have an iterative process, but in which each iteration changes the rule being iterated. So the list of virtues and the list of capabilities changes over time.

What is the way we settle these matters? Well, that's part of these matters.

Some folk supose that thinking of morals as made but not found devalues them, as if they were as a result arbitrary. On the contrary, it makes our actions central and of the greatest import.

Your somewhat cryptic assertions don't seem to show anything. A group of humans sits around a primordial campfire chewing on bison. One of them says, "Hey! Why don't we love each other?" They nail him to a tree.

"if you only look at times BEFORE Achilles reaches the tortoise, then it will appear as if Achilles never reaches the tortoise". — Agree-to-Disagree

There are an infinity of intervals before Achilles passes the tortoise, each one half the time of the previous, and so with a finite sum. The process of Achilles passing the tortoise therefore takes a finite time.

End of story, really.

It's not that meaning is use. Explanations in terms of meaning invariably reach a point were one asks the meaning of "meaning" or some such, running against the limits of that sort of approach. The admonition here is to stop looking at meaning and look instead at what one is doing - to look instead at use. This transcends the discussion of meaning, replacing what is said by what can be shown.

Wittgenstein already won this particular game by pointing out that it is not so much what we say as want we do that is of import.

If you want to make the argument that morals are not relative to time, place, and the peculiarities of different cultures, you can, but you're going to have argue either some mystical creator of morality or you're going to have argue something inherent within the constitution of the human DNA that demands them. — Hanover

A poor argument, if that's what this is. Devine command and evolutionary necessity do not cover all the options. This also makes the mistake of thinking that morals are found, not made - discovered, not intended.

If arguing from a purely secular point of view, morals are just another form of law, etiquite, custom, or tact. — Hanover

But what of ethics?

I'm not seeing a difference. Won't you also have to explain what a side and an angle are? How would you do that? Is your point that red is a simple and square, a construction? Is "angle" a simple or a construct? What about "side"?

Yep, tautologies are true because they remain true under substitution - and that is becasue of the very definition of extensionality. So a=a or p v ~p are analytic because no matter what you substitute in to a, it remains true. Same for any tautology.

But a Batchelor of Arts need not be married, and a bachelor might be married to his work.

That is, Quine accepts the analytic/synthetic distinction when it can be given a firmly extensional definition.

So far as I understand the sort of formal systems @sime has in mind, analyticity is defined in terms of construction rather than substitution. The identity a=a is always constructible, without the need for external verification. Not so for "p v ~p". Nor for "Bachelors are unmarried".

So yes, synonymy requires verification - "witness".

Nice video.

If all the rooms are filled you can't move 1 to 2 and 3 to room 4 because all the infinite rooms are already filled. — Gregory

If you were right then you could specify who does not get a room. In the first case, each individual is assigned to the room one more than the room they are in, and so every individual gets a new room. The person who was in room two is now in room three; the person who was in room three is now in room four; and so on. In the second case, each individual is assigned to the room twice the number of the room they are in. Again, each individual gets a room. In the third case, in which and infinity of new guests arrives, and the spreadsheet is used, each individual is still assigned a room. But for the party bus, the diagonal argument shows that there will always be an individual who does not get a room.

This is what happens when you try to assign a whole number to every point on a segment of the continuum. There are too many points on the segment to be counted.

But this is a different story to the one we started with. Achilles starts behind the tortoise, which has a small head start. By the time he reaches the tortoise’s starting point, the tortoise has moved forward a shorter distance. Achilles then reaches this new position, but the tortoise has moved again. This process repeats infinitely, but the distances form a geometric series that converges to a finite sum. The total time taken also converges to a finite limit. Achilles reaches the tortoise’s position in a finite time and then surpasses it. The paradox arises only if one mistakenly assumes that infinite steps must require infinite time, which they do not.

They don't. The continuum is not just a set of points.

Yep.

Take all the points on a segment and line each one up one at a time to the whole numbers. — Gregory

You can't. Between any two points you select, there are infinitely many more points. There are only countably many whole numbers, but far more points in a segment...

As I said, I can’t help you.

A koch snowflake has a finite area but an infinite boundary. Odd, that. Very nice.

See — Gregory

I see you haven't understood. I doubt I can help. If it is continuous, the by that very fact it is not discreet.

While I'm not at all sure of the wisdom of answering here, you can divide it - into bits of the continuum, which are themselves continuous.

A general rule: if the description you give of something that happens says that it can't happen, you are using the wrong description.

...by treating the open sets of the real line as solid lines and by forgetting the fact that continuum has points, — sime

A continuous path is not reducible to a mere sequence of points; rather, it is a unified whole in which limits make sense without requiring traversal of individual points.

Treat it as points, or as a continuum, but not both.

Continuous means infinitely dense — Gregory

No, it doesn't.

Who here thinks there is no difference between what they want and what is right?

Nothing said implies it isn't. But not to the thoughts and feelings of the doer alone.

Good point. I guess the response here might be that an emotivist might acknowledge that we may sometimes be compelled to act contrary to our immediate emotions, but would deny that there is an objective "ought" beyond how we feel about it. — Tom Storm

Hence non-cognitivism rather then emotivism, and the implication that one must think about the situation and not only about one's emotional response. One doesn't just feel, one thinks about consequences, and hence about what one wants to be the case. Setting this out as just (no more than...) an emotional response does not do it justice.

And what is the place of the word "objective" here? Would it be OK to assert that there is an "ought" in "one ought change the baby's nappy" but no ought in "objectively, one ought change the baby's nappy"?

Looking at these issues in terms of intent and action and consequences gives us a much more viable framework than "emotion". It moves from doing what you want to doing what you should, and hence away from mere egoism.

Murder is wrong because of the way the community reacts to it, — frank

You sure about that 'because'?

First off, murder is unlawful killing. Some ways of killing are not unlawful. Is murder wrong becasue it is killing or becasue it is against the law?

Further, if the community reacts with glee, that makes it OK? Civilised countries have outlawed capital punishment, becasue they consider it immoral.

It's always a bit more complicated...

, ,

Why should there be only one thing that "drives" our actions or has the "primary role"?

Isn't it entirely possible for that some act be emotional disgusting or repugnant, and yet you ought do it? Ever changed a nappy? Isn't it a commonplace that you often ought do things in defiance of how you feel? What is courage? And see 's examples. The very same actions can be commendable or culpable.

Ethics as the study of interplay between intent and action, in a social context.

Is your point that Zeno treats motion as a series of steps, while both physics and maths treat it as continuous?

I'll go along with that.

Ok. If that works for you.

I really don't care. Seems parochial.

Thanks, that makes your point clearer.

So type theory can be used to give a clear account of what is analytic and what is synthetic. This is different to what is necessary and what is possible, the concerns of modal logic. So we now have formal tools at hand with which we can make distinctions that were not available to Quine. Quine rightly dismissed the analytic/synthetic distinction as too vague, and consequently also dismissed modality, which he understood as closely related. Subsequent - or perhaps even consequent - developments have shown us ways to revive these ideas.

It's what you do, not what you feel or think, that counts, isn't it?

Would you want to say that the extension of Square X simply is what we mean by (or define as) a square? — J

Perhaps bead eight is square. In that case, and given that our domain is just the beads, "...is square" and '...is eight" are extensionally equivalent, and whatever is extensional the case with square things will be extensively the case with bead eight.

So it does not look as if the choice of red is an issue.

Take note that "red" and "square" are not proper names.

Part of what is shown here is the poverty of phenomenological approaches that is simply bypassed by the extensional treatment. We don't need the messy thinking that accompanies trying to explain if and how what you see as red and what I see as red (...or square...) are the same. So ling as we agree that {1,2,3} are red and {8} is square, we can get on.

A whole philosophical quagmire avoided.

, The ambiguities around "emotion" are perhaps the reason that the view Tom is espousing is no more often called non-cognitivism, placing the emphasis on the supposed inapplicability of reason to moral sentiments. Much of the literature around Wittgenstein assumes either the interpretation that he took ethics to be outside of language and so not a part of rational discourse, or alternatively that ethics (and aesthetics, even more so) pervades our whole world, showing itself in every aspect of our social lives. The tricky bit might be seeing these as not mutually contradictory.

There's also a reason that what was once called subjectivism, then emotivism, is now commonly called by philosophers non-cognitivism - names that grew as folk expounding on the topic found it necessary to take more and more into account to defend the basic sentiment that ethics is about how we feel about things, and not so much about what we think about things.

One major problem here is the separation of what we feel and what we think is no where near as clear and clean a cut as this approach supposes. Another is that what we think and feel tend to the private or subjective, with all the accompanying difficulties.

We have been encouraged to look to use - not to think, but to look. There is a difference between looking around and seeing how things are, a comparatively passive activity, and looking around to see how things might be changed, both aesthetically and ethically - a far more active process. The activities being undertaken in these two contrasting cases are quite distinct.

By looking to what we might do, we bypass the opacity of thinking and feeling, refocusing instead on our acts of volition, and how we might change things. Fundamentally, ethics and aesthetics are about what we might do.

The difference is neatly summed up in Anscombe's list of things from the shop. While the words may be the same, there are two very different uses for the list. We might take the list to the shop and purchase the things on it; in which case we change the world to fit the list; or we might write the things we purchased out in a list, perhaps as a receipt, and so change the list to match the world. The difference here is not in the list but in our intent.

All this by way of suggesting that it might be our intent that is important in ethical situations rather than our emotional response.

yes, indeed. That was said with some irony. But the disruptive emperor requires novel strategies.

Yes. It's about how we want things to be. It's not that emotivism is wrong so much as that it doesn't properly recognise the difference between what I want and what we want.

Trump wants to take over Ukraine's power supply. And he is looking to expand the Union.

Zelenskyy might consider calling Trump's bluff by offering Ukraine as the 51st state, threatening the US with a direct conflict with Russia, but with the benefit of a huge wealth of what the Orange Emperor calls "raw earths".

Trump is seeking to manipulate the war to benefit 'merican business. Zelensky might consider giving him what he wants. Then Trump might develop an appreciation of the complexity of the problem.

Back to the Binding of Isaac. The replies assumed that I was holding god culpable for the torture of a child. But god, being god, does what it is necessary to do; so if god demands a sacrifice, he could not have done otherwise.

But Abraham, on the other hand, might have not collected the wood, might not have trussed his son or held the knife. He may have done otherwise. On this account it is Abraham, not god, who is to blame.

Yes, but my point, perhaps badly worded, is that if the statement 'stealing is wrong' amounts to no more than the emotivist's "boo stealing!" This can't be truth-apt. I'm not convinced yet that the emotivist is wrong about this. — Tom Storm

Ok, but then my point still stands. One can't derive any consequent from "boo stealing!". At the very least a moral statement worthy of the name needs to apply to more than just oneself. That you don't like chocolate ice cream is not a reason for you to stop others eating chocolate ice cream. That one ought not kick puppies is a reason for you to stop others kicking puppies. "One ought not kick puppies" is different to "Boo puppy kicking".

The statement "stealing is illegal" is true, verifiable by looking the law up to see see what it says. — Hanover

Yep. "stealing is immoral" is a much harder problem.

Do we have them just to facilitate survival and therefore ingrained in our DNA? Or do they come from a higher source of wisdom directing us toward higher purpose? — Hanover

Why are they the only options? What are the other options? And these two do not appear to be mutually exclusive.

Not something with which I am familiar. But in intuitionistic type theory, isn't a theorem synthetic if its truth depends on constructive proof rather than mere definitions? That is, not all synthetic theorems contain existential quantifiers. Consider "Every red bead appears before every blue bead on the string", which is not analytic, which must be determined by inspecting the arrangement of beads, and which uses universal quantification only. I may be misunderstanding your point, but being synthetic is not dependent on existential quantification only. However if your point is just that theorems containing an existential quantification are always synthetic because they require constructive proof, then yep.

In practice, we allow empirical counterexamples to revise our concepts, meaning that the statement was never purely analytic to begin with. Quine might say that "All swans are white" was part of a revisable web of belief rather than something analytic. It's not that we stipulate that "all and only white waterfowl are swans", an unfalsifiable, analytic and false proposal.

In any case, the idea of using an intuitionistic logic here is interesting.

…we need a "strong man" leader. — Ludwig V

Lord, preserve us from strong men.

“Necessary“ should probably be used in its quite specific modal fashion. “Absolute“ is pretty ill defined, and probably a nonsense word. It would be interesting to do a catalogue of hinge terms and bedrock terms and riverbed terms and so on.

Yep. The bedrock metaphor is not as good as the riverbed metaphor. The bed remains relatively fixed.