• Quine: Reference and Modality
    ↪sime
    ,
    ↪Count Timothy von Icarus
    , in probability theory the possible worlds are the outcome of a stochastic process, a coin flip or whatever. But in Modal Logic possible worlds are stipulated, hypothetical stats of affairs. They are not the same sort of thing. Care is needed in order to not be misled by the analogy.
  • Quine: Reference and Modality
    Framing modality in terms of possible worlds requires a radical, counterintuitive retranslation of counterfactual reasoning into terms speakers themselves are unlikely to recognize as true to their intentions, while at the same time requiring either a bloated ontology of "existing" possible worlds, or some other sort of explanation of what they are. — Count Timothy von Icarus
    You place a lot of weight in intuition. What, then, if my intuition differs from yours? Which is to be preferred?

    What would one make of someone who suggested that predicate logic "framing predicate logic in terms of p's and q' requires a radical, counterintuitive retranslation of sentential reasoning into terms speakers themselves are unlikely to recognise as true to their intentions, while at the same time requiring either a bloated ontology of "propositions" , or some other sort of explanation of what they are?" One would hope that they had misunderstood what was being done, and try to explain tot hem that if someone's intuition is that a modus tollens argument was incorrect, then the intuition might well be questionable.

    Of course it might also be that the intuition has been misinterpreted in applying the modus tollens, and here the predicate logic might be of use to set out where that misinterpretation sits.

    But it will not do to say that one will not accept predicate logic simply becasue it does not suit you.

    "Why must we be under a commitment to understanding sentences in these terms? Certainly not because this is how sentences have been historically or widely conceived, or because it's what most people mean by the common usage of the term."

    Teach an introductory logic course and you will quickly find that applying patterns such as modus tollens to sentences is not intuitive to many, nor how people string sentences together. A large part of your teaching sentential logic is correcting those intuitions.


    Predicate modal logic and possible world semantics give us strong and coherent ways to use the language of modality. We know it is coherent, we know it works, from the structure of the formal language. If soldiering needs to be taught, then so does reasoning.
  • Logical Arguments for God Show a Lack of Faith; An Actual Factual Categorical Syllogism
    You are smarter than “indecipherable.” You can’t see the problem? — Fire Ologist
    Oh, I can see the problem.

    Cheers.
  • Logical Arguments for God Show a Lack of Faith; An Actual Factual Categorical Syllogism
    ↪Fire Ologist
    Still very unclear.

    What is believed is expressed by a proposition, rather than a "thing", an object.

    The other two of your three bolded sentences are indecipherable.
  • Australian politics
    A facebook page that might be worth keeping an eye on.

    https://www.facebook.com/IndependentNewsAU

    Orange is bush teal?
  • Quine: Reference and Modality
    Consider: "In order for the green conscripts to be effective in battle it was necessary for Napoleon to train them into a disciplined army first." — Count Timothy von Icarus
    In all the possible worlds in which green conscripts were effective in battle, Napoleon had first trained them into a disciplined army. It's just access, again. The only worlds in which green conscripts were effective in battle were those accessible from the worlds in which Napoleon had first trained them into a disciplined army.

    Whether it's true or not is a different issue.

    But it can be set out clearly with possible world semantics using accessibility.
  • Logical Arguments for God Show a Lack of Faith; An Actual Factual Categorical Syllogism
    ↪Fire Ologist
    When you use "you" after addressing both Egg and I, it is unclear who "you" refers to.

    The interesting bit in your post was the hint that we might treat faith as relating to action - but that would need filling out.

    Otherwise, there are two differing uses for "faith" - roughly, strong belief and complete trust. The complete trust use is the one relating to actions, the strong belief sense is that used in the OP, and in my reply. (Hence the stock theistic retort that faith is not about belief but trust... trading on an ambiguity, and seen already in this thread.)

    Can you differentiate these in your reply to me?
  • Ontology of Time
    ↪J
    Does the question "Which is the real value of A?" make sense?
  • Quine: Reference and Modality
    The bulk of part three places Quine's position in a few historical arguments involving Church, Carnap, Lewis and particularly, Barcan.

    (37) is curious. "An object, of itself and by whatever name or none, must be seen as having some of its traits necessarily and others contingently, despite the fact that the latter traits follow just as analytically from some ways of specifying the object as the former traits do from other ways of specifying it." But after Barcan, and then Kripke, we might permit an object to have necessary yet contingent traits. That gold has a certain atomic number is contingent, yet necessary. Some properties (like being H₂O for water or having 79 protons for gold) are essential to the object, despite having been discovered empirically rather than analytically derived.

    There's that words, "essential".

    If anyone is following this, they might well be interested in the section from the SEP article on Quine's misunderstanding of Barcan, and related topics. In particular, Barcan argues that Quine is mistaken to think that modal logic is committed to Aristotelian essentialism.

    And so we arrive at the Barcan Formula, ◊(∃α)A⇒(∃α)◊A.

    There's a lot here to work through.
  • Ontology of Time
    Argumentum ad youtube...
  • Logical Arguments for God Show a Lack of Faith; An Actual Factual Categorical Syllogism
    ↪Fire Ologist
    , What?
  • Logical Arguments for God Show a Lack of Faith; An Actual Factual Categorical Syllogism
    @DifferentiatingEgg, from where I sit the argument owes more to David Lewis, mentioned in one of my earlier threads.

    But you will see it through your own window.
  • Logical Arguments for God Show a Lack of Faith; An Actual Factual Categorical Syllogism
    Cunning reversal, they are the faithful that overcome themselves in their opposite? To inciting to higher and higher... Nietzsche would be very proud of this from YOU of all people Banno. — DifferentiatingEgg

    So much the worse for Nietzsche, then.
  • Logical Arguments for God Show a Lack of Faith; An Actual Factual Categorical Syllogism
    The best in the thread imo. — DifferentiatingEgg
    Unfortunately, that wasn't hard.
  • Logical Arguments for God Show a Lack of Faith; An Actual Factual Categorical Syllogism
    If you like. You were born with some of that irrational faith. You can't live without it. — frank

    You have to take something as granted, yes. That's a long way from what is involved in faith. One can review what one takes as granted, but to review what one takes on faith is to breech that faith.
  • Logical Arguments for God Show a Lack of Faith; An Actual Factual Categorical Syllogism
    ↪DifferentiatingEgg
    Or faith is the antithesis of rationality.
  • Ontology of Time
    So is living — substantivalism
    Only if you choose to view it as such.

    But if you have a choice, better not to spend your time here.

    I'm off to plant some flowers.
  • Logical Arguments for God Show a Lack of Faith; An Actual Factual Categorical Syllogism
    ↪DifferentiatingEgg


    SO let's check out the consequences of this view.

    Belief is holding that something is true. One can believe that something is true for all sorts of reasons, or for no reason at all. Rational folk will try to believe stuff that is true, and so will use arguments and evidence and such, and ground their beliefs.

    Faith is more that just holding that something is true. Faith requires that one believe even in the face of adversity. Greater faith is had by those who believe despite the arguments and the evidence.

    So those with the greatest faith would be the ones convinced by logical arguments that god does not exist, and yet who believe despite this.

    The most faithful will be seeking to disprove that god exists.

    Make of this what you will.
  • Ontology of Time
    Fuck them then! — substantivalism

    Philosophy is a pointless endeavour.
  • Ontology of Time
    There is nothing called "pitch" that can move yet be self-identical. — J
    The sound changed in pitch. What changed? The sound. What was self-identical (a phrase that only a philosopher would use)? The sound, the tone, the note - it moved from low to high.

    I firmly hold out for the position that, literally, acoustically, a pitch cannot move. In what (conceptual?) space is it moving? — J
    The pitch of the note moved.

    I talk about pitches and melodies "moving" all the time; it's standard English. — J
    Yep. Let that be your guide, rather than an esoteric rant. At some point, one can only laugh and walk away.
  • Ontology of Time
    instantaneous velocity — Metaphysician Undercover
    Sounds like an irrelevant word dug up from ChatGpt. — Corvus
    :roll:
  • Ontology of Time
    ↪frank
    Wouldn't it be wonderful to hear the sounds the workers made building the classical structures of Egypt?
  • Ontology of Time
    2) A slide moves from D to E. — J

    The pitch moved from D to E.
  • Autonomous Government + Voluntary Taxation
    Since I am so displeased with democracy as it exists in the USA — Brendan Golledge

    There's your first mistake - thinking the USA is democratic...
  • Ontology of Time
    ↪Wayfarer
    Yep.
  • Ontology of Time
    ...what is heard is a changing sound which is not a physical thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

    So sound is not a physical thing. I give up.
  • Ontology of Time
    ...you really are producing a series of notes that can be discretely specified, — J
    I don't see what to make of this. In your own words,
    it's still a specific, determinate pitch that could, in theory, be further subdivided. — J
    and
    ...not, as I said, by the human ear — J
    Measurements might well be discrete. The sound is not.

    The same question, in the former case, can't be answered at all. — J
    Volume or pitch move.

    ...we do hear a series of tones, we just can't recognize them. A software program can. — J
    Well, if you do not recognise them, in what sense are they discrete? As you said above, a better program with more memory could add more data points...

    That you could think this is somewhat astonishing. Did you not study calculus?
  • Ontology of Time
    That is sort of the reason I'm trying to be better about being too dissuasive about esoteric philosophies because they may be implying something that, when properly translated into my language, is not all that peculiar or useless. — substantivalism
    "May be...'. We make maximum sense of the words of others when optimise agreement. It remains that sometimes what folk believe is different to how things are. Sometimes we are wrong.

    I don't see that physics does adopt "the cinematographic view of time as 'frames of a universal movie'". Certainly classical and relativistic physics assumes continuity. Some recent theories may use discrete mathematics - Lattice Quantum Field Theory, Cellular Automata, or Loop Quantum Gravity, for example. Not central and not accepted.

    And it may be worth considering what is going on here. The physical world does not care whether we choose continuous or discrete mathematics to best describe it. It is what it is, regardless of whether we describe it one way of the other. The choice between discrete and continuous mathematics is not a choice between how things are, but about what we say about how things are.


    ↪Fire Ologist bear in mind, any series or collections of tones is only a tune when somebody recognises it as such. ‘It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure’ said Einstein. — Wayfarer
    That is, melody is a cultural, not a physical, item.
  • Ontology of Time
    ↪J
    What is to count as a part and what as a whole here?

    Here's a bit of tab for a slide...
    guitar-tab-slides-technique.png

    It marks the beginning and end of the slide, the D, and the end, the E; however the slide does not consist in these two notes, but the movement between them. The tone of slide blues is very different to that of, say, a straight folk pick, and a portamento is distinct from a glissando. Notice that the move can be counted as a unit, and that it is distinct to the individual notes. We do not hear a series of distinct notes - unless the artist is incompetent.

    Is the slide or the portamento a physical entity? If not, then I am not sure what else it might be... Calling it a perception is wrong.

    Denying continuity here is mistaken.

    I'm not sure that you disagree. But I am pretty confident Meta disagrees. Corvus on past experience probably agrees and disagrees and thinks that's fine.
  • Ontology of Time
    That's why Banno's conception of "instantaneous velocity" is self-contradicting nonsense. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Not Banno. Physics and mathematics.

    Meta is unable to understand basic calculus. He and Corvus should have fun together.

    Looks like equivocation to me. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Yes, Meta, I was pointing out that
    ↪Metaphysician Undercover
    was an equivocation.
  • Ontology of Time
    If a tone changes, up or down, it becomes a different tone. The same thing happens to colour. — Metaphysician Undercover

    Yep. Or almost. The tone moved up, or down. Which tone moved up? That one. Then it moved down. The tone of that tone changed... The first "tone" is an individual, the second an attribute. The attribute of that individual changed - perhaps in pitch, perhaps in timbre, perhaps in volume.

    It's the same tone, with a different tone.

    The colour of that wall changed - did you paint it? The colour of that wall is still the colour of that wall, even if it moves from red to green. The more things change the more they stay the same.

    :lol:
  • Ontology of Time
    ↪J
    Maybe listen to more slide?

    Why shouldn't a tone move? Why restrict movement to physical objects alone, or to changes in place. The PIE root is *meuə-, to push away; found in emotion, and momentous, and mob, and mutiny...

    And I don't see any reason to suppose that a pitch "moving up and down" is metaphorical - high roads are of more import, not altitude; is that too high handed? Is it high time I got off my high horse?

    Continuity is a pretty clear notion. Instantaneous velocity makes sense. That such things confuse some when considered in fine detail does not detract from the fact of their practicality. It's what can be done with such language that counts.
  • Ontology of Time
    ↪substantivalism
    ok.
  • Ontology of Time
    ↪substantivalism
    It seems you are far to clever to be understood.
  • Ontology of Time
    ↪substantivalism
    ,
    ↪substantivalism



    So... you have a personal preference for a complete answer that is wrong over an incomplete answer that is right?

    Why should I care.
  • Logical Arguments for God Show a Lack of Faith; An Actual Factual Categorical Syllogism
    Good to see the local Christians all getting on so well.
  • Ontology of Time
    ↪substantivalism
    I've no idea what that post says.
  • Quine: Reference and Modality
    ↪schopenhauer1
    OK.
  • Quine: Reference and Modality
    For Kripke, I would think there needs to be a mechanism for which the same word is necessarily that referent in all possible worlds. — schopenhauer1
    The mechanism is the stipulation.
  • Quine: Reference and Modality
    ↪schopenhauer1
    I'm not seeing this as a problem for Quine, or for Kripke. It could as well be settled by saying "Ok, We'll call this one "Fred", and that one "Harry". Nothing to do with modality.
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