• Austin: Sense and Sensibilia
    There is no pure and passive receptivity. — JuanZu
    That much is obvious, and not just from Kant. Our understanding of perception has progressed somewhat in the time since he wrote anything substantive.

    Welcome to the Forum.

    ↪Bella fekete
    I've been unable to make sense of your posts.
  • A Case for Moral Anti-realism
    ...in so far I consider truth to be corresponding to states of affairs, and I don't understand morals to be states of affairs. — AmadeusD

    This has come up a few times.

    And yet, one ought not keep slaves. It is therefore true that "One ought not keep slaves".

    And hence, if truth is corresponding to states of affairs, then that one ought not keep slaves is a state of affairs.

    Or there is more to truth than mere correspondence.

    This seems to suppose that ethics are the correct basis/es for considering morals. . — AmadeusD
    I can't make sense of how you are distinguishing morals and ethics here. Ethics is the field of study that has as its subject, morals. What you have said is analogous to "thjis seems to suppose that botany is the correct basis for considering plants". Well, yes.

    ...ethics basically assume either 1. A worthwhile external benchmark (you could think revelation or law here); or 2. Some way to ascertain certainty around a moral claim via some ethical consideration. — AmadeusD
    You have not set out why these follow, and indeed, there are ethical proposals that do not propose an external benchmark (subjectivism) nor ethical certainty (nihilism).

    If you're concluding that for ethics, individuals must 'work it out for themselves' you're (to my mind) precluding an external mitigating authority (or force) which would be required as a source of 'ethical truth' which would be required to ground a moral truth. — AmadeusD
    Here again is the ubiquitous confusion of belief and truth. Here's another analogy. The Earth is not flat. It is true that the Earth is not flat. Even given that truth, each individual can choose whether to believe that the Earth is flat, or not. They must work it out for themselves.

    The exact same applies to ethical truths. Folk choose to believe, or not. They must work it out for themselves. Their believe does not determine the truth of the proposal.

    Notice that you do understand that ethical truths "ground" moral truths, something you seem to deny, above.

    I just don't understand how that's an objective or 'true' statement. I — AmadeusD
    Have a read of @Leontiskos posts, above. They offer some novel contraries to this proposal.

    In addition, there is a confusion here about "subjective" statements, such that you seem to suppose that hey cannot be true. That would be very odd. But then, the subjective/objective distinction is fraught with conceptual puzzles.

    If you're decoupling ethics from morals and essentially considering ethics teleological and morals some how truth-apt, I'm not really understanding how that works — AmadeusD
    That much is apparent. That's not at all what I am proposing. I'm just pointing out that there are moral truths. The inability of your theorising to deal with this simple observation perhaps tells us, not to reject moral truths, but your theorising.
  • "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme"
    That comes from empirical research though, not from a bunch of questions asked by someone in an armchair. — schopenhauer1

    Up you get, then.
  • "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme"
    ↪schopenhauer1


    Have a read of this: A Stanford professor says science shows free will doesn’t exist. Here’s why he’s mistaken

    Here's the conclusion:
    Sapolsky’s broader mistake seems to be assuming his questions are purely scientific: answered by looking just at what the science says. While science is relevant, we first need some idea of what free will is (which is a metaphysical question) and how it relates to moral responsibility (a normative question). This is something philosophers have been interrogating for a very long time.

    Interdisciplinary work is valuable and scientists are welcome to contribute to age-old philosophical questions. But unless they engage with existing arguments first, rather than picking a definition they like and attacking others for not meeting it, their claims will simply be confused.

    Observation, and empirical science generally, is insufficient when conceptual clarification is needed.
  • Convince Me of Moral Realism
    "One cannot transmute lead into gold." — hypericin
    You might have chosen a better example.
  • "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme"
    ↪J
    Interesting article. I like the modal approach, but it might be overly formal. I think your Astrology point shows that the article does not apply to incommensurable "theories" or "Conceptual schema"; the defining characteristic being the way of measurement (or if you prefer, assessment) within the systems cannot be matched against each other. In the article such a matching is assumed. Astronomy measures success in a vey different way to astrology.
  • Austin: Sense and Sensibilia
    Just some random points. — Ludwig V

    I can't offer much more. Ayer was more politically active, supporting the Labor movement and advocating decriminalisation of Homosexuality. Biographers note that Austin was more interested in teaching than writing, and I think his influence is there in the Four Women, who were all political an attended his sessions, although none were in his circle. There'd be a PhD in arguing that case.

    I don't think OLP disappeared. OLP provided philosophers with a new toolbox, and while the details changed as philosophy became both more formal and more about cognition, I think there is another PhD in showing that the tools did not disappear but instead became ubiquitous. Analytic philosophy takes the sort of conceptual analysis pioneered by the OLP philosophers as granted.
  • An example where we can derive an "ought" from an "is"
    s-l1600.jpg

    I'm presuming the tanks are empty. The horse could not possibly pull that many full tanks.
  • A Case for Moral Anti-realism
    I came into this thread simply to point out that there are moral truths. Like all these discussions, the conversation has gone off in a dozen different directions, making it impossible to work on all the conceptual puzzles. Some have understood direction of fit - probably those who are familiar with Anscombe - others have misunderstood. There's an uncritical presumption of correspondence theories of truth in some posts, and the ill-defined distinction between subject and object popping up in stray places. There's differences of opinion as to what constitutes moral realism, and misunderstandings of the nature of anti-realism. And there's the ubiquitous confusion of "belief" with "truth", together with the related and conceptually fraught "knowledge". And the tendency to argue in terms of "isms" instead of looking at the detail.

    And a tendency to make assertions rather than give reasons.

    Philosophy is hard. Much harder than most folk suppose. I can't see any further progress being made here.

    Another way of saying that there are philosophically interesting ideas relating to the topic, but they are not being discussed here.
  • A Case for Moral Anti-realism
    This seems to be an implicit but quite strong admission of moral subjectivity — AmadeusD
    Can you explain your thinking?
  • A Case for Moral Anti-realism
    That is, here is a truth without a direction of fit at all, and since we have to accommodate truth to at least allow for logical truth we must accept that sometimes there are true sentences which do not set out how the world is, that are true regardless of the states of affairs. — Moliere

    Yep.
  • A Case for Moral Anti-realism
    But what distinguishes Bob’s taste that everyone ought to eat only vanilla from the moral fact that everyone ought to eat only vanilla? — Bob Ross
    Let's do that again.

    It's a question of taste if it only applies to you - Bob likes vanilla.
    It's a question of morality if it applies to everyone - Everyone ought like vanilla.

    "Bob’s taste that everyone ought to eat only vanilla" just attempts to confuse the two. If it applies to everyone, it's a moral claim.

    “How do you know that any given moral judgment is factual (as opposed to being a taste: non-factual)?” — Bob Ross
    This amounts to: what should you believe? You should work that out for yourself. Indeed, in questions of ethics, you have no choice but to work it out for yourself.

    Saying that a moral fact is a true proposition doesn’t inform me how you come to know that it is true. — Bob Ross
    No, it doesn't.

    This just seems like a non-sequitur — Bob Ross
    Well, no. I'm just pointing out that one can't make someone believe something. there are folk here who claim to doubt the chair they sit on and the people they chat to... Mad, but that's just how it is. So I'm not going to try to convince you that kicking puppies for fun is wrong. I'll just call the RSPCA.

    Incidentally, that's pretty much why I haven't participated in your other thread. Your convictions are your concern, no one else's.

    Moral facts are about how the world is such that the world should be. — Bob Ross
    That just confuses direction of fit. Oh, well. I tried.
  • When Does Philosophy Become Affectation?
    ...we have no reasonable basis to challenge the veracity of our senses? — Hanover
    I hope that is not what
    ↪Ciceronianus
    is suggesting. I certainly don't read what he has said in that way. There's all sorts of situations in which it is entirely reasonable to doubt your senses.

    What would be absurd is doubting them in every instance.

    What the image shows is that with suitable equipment we can see IR. There's no suggestion that this is how the flower "truly" appears - a weird thought.
    Once we establish a basis for our skepticism regarding the veracity of our perceptions in one instance (as we just did from your flower example), we'd then logically need to do the same for all perceptions, — Hanover
    So once seeing the Müller-Lyer Illusion would lead you to doubt every observation thereafter? I don't see why.
  • An example where we can derive an "ought" from an "is"
    ↪J
    For my dollars, moral certainty is a furphy.

    No algorithms for deriving moral facts. Only heuristics, and then only if you have time.

    There's just making choices, something that one can become better at with age.

    Hence, virtue ethics.
  • Austin: Sense and Sensibilia
    ↪schopenhauer1


    It doesn't matter. Think of the loonies and colossi of affectation he savaged, so politely. Well, fairly politely. — Ciceronianus

    You still don't get it.
  • Austin: Sense and Sensibilia
    ↪Ludwig V
    Ah, I see you had much the same thought.
  • Austin: Sense and Sensibilia
    But Austin is not championing the status quo, as if it was more entitled or that it naturally has more solidity. We can unreasonably question another, but in doing so we put ourselves out (too familiar perhaps), or put them out (opening ourselves to calls of libel). In any case, we subject ourselves to judgment, and it is that responsibility Austin wants to be certain we understand. — Antony Nickles

    Given the accusation of a conservatism so strong that it refused to engage at all with politics, this is a point that it might be worth following up on.

    A sympathetic question - can this stance be justified from the text?

    And more generally - how might Austin answer the question of relevance here:

    Especially the last few seconds.
  • An example where we can derive an "ought" from an "is"
    How, then, do we account for the fact that "It is wrong to harm people" -- supposedly also a brute fact -- has engendered endless debate over the centuries? — J

    Direction of fit, again, in addition to ambiguities and hedging and so on. I'm piggybacking on that term, which was used b y others; my main interest here is that there seem to be true moral statements, and that for some of those it is odd to demand a justification. Talk of brute statements is a bit strong, and probably pulls in too much baggage. How about "hinge"? At least it has different baggage...
  • An example where we can derive an "ought" from an "is"
    I note that verification is what gives this statement veracity. — AmadeusD
    Sure. Analytically, verification is other folk, or the same folk at other times, testing and agreeing with the proposition. I don't see any prima facie reason that could not be done with a moral brute fact.

    Yeah, there's a way in which "one ought not do harm" is tautological if harm is just what we ought not do. There'd be work here in sorting out harm in a way that pays out.
  • An example where we can derive an "ought" from an "is"
    my position is is not a brute fact — AmadeusD

    Well, that's right. The mooted brute fact is “it is wrong to harm people.” At issue is whether this is to be accepted as it stands, or if it needs to be grounded in some other proposition.

    So, do you think it true?

    And if you agree that it is true, do you do so as a result of other considerations, or does it appear to you to stand on its own?

    Compare "This sentence has five words". Presuming you agree that it is true, are there some other statements that imply its truth, or does it stand on its own?

    Or "The acceleration due to gravity is 9.8m/s/s". Sure, we can add sentences specifying how we measure acceleration. But leaving aside rules for interpretation, that gravity accelerates objects at that rate is just a brute fact...

    To be sure, there are folk here who adopt an antirealist view and will argue that there is no acceleration without that interpretation, but i somehow don't think that's you. I might be wrong.
  • Austin: Sense and Sensibilia
    So any presaging must be the other way round. — Ludwig V
    Well, Searle and others have made the claim that Austin only took a passing interest in Wittgenstein, and the stuff about doubt is mostly in On Certainty, which I think came out in 1969. But yes, it is a point of contention.

    Searle seemed to think Austin had not understood Private Language.
  • An example where we can derive an "ought" from an "is"
    ↪Michael
    Yep.

    That's the answer to
    ↪AmadeusD


    Demanding a justification for a brute fact is... incongruous. Indicative of a misunderstanding of brute.

    But there are folk here who demand a justification for the chair they are sitting on, as if it were justifications all the way down instead of turtles.
  • An example where we can derive an "ought" from an "is"
    ↪AmadeusD
    What?
  • An example where we can derive an "ought" from an "is"
    They could also be inverse. Causing a greater harm, to prevent a lesser harm to a less deserving target (Israel/Hamas comes to mind.. ) — AmadeusD

    Obvious special pleading.
  • An example where we can derive an "ought" from an "is"
    If I may...
    There are certainly situations in which harm (for instance to prevent harm) is warranted, morally. — AmadeusD

    Situations in which a greater harm is avoided?

    That reinforces, rather than contradicts, the brute fact.
  • A Case for Moral Anti-realism
    ↪baker
    That's a pretty dogmatic thing to say.

    Only on the assumption that everyone is equal. — baker
    You're missing the grammatical point. But then you have a particularly jaded view of humanity. Morality is irrelevant if you don't have some hope.
  • A Case for Moral Anti-realism
    ↪baker
    You use "realist" as if realists were a block who all have the one opinion.
  • Austin: Sense and Sensibilia
    ↪Ludwig V
    Well done. Interesting format.

    Again I'm noticing how much this presages Wittgenstein. This time the discussion of doubt in On Certainty, with "hedging" taking on the role of doubting.
  • A Case for Moral Anti-realism
    I'm not a fan of the terms "subjective" and "objective". — baker
    So we have some agreement.

    Objectivists and moral realists talk as if it's not they, persons, who talk, but that when they open their mouths, The Absolute, Objective Truth comes out. — baker
    That's one, negative, way to view what is going on. Another more positive way is to see those claims as tentative, looking for common ground, for stuff on which we can agree.

    Seems to be a difference of disposition.
  • A Case for Moral Anti-realism
    Nothing you said actually explains how you can discern a moral fact from a taste. — Bob Ross

    Well, that one's easy. Bob prefers Vanilla - that's a question of taste, and might lead to Bob only eating Vanilla ice cream. "Bob prefers Vanilla" and "Bob only eats Vanilla ice cream" are a statement of taste.

    But if Bob and his army were to insist that everyone ought eat only vanilla, and that chocolate was evil and the work of the devil, that would be about morals.

    Questions of taste re about what the individual should choose. Questions of morality are about what everyone should choose.

    but I am failing to see how you would know this in your view. — Bob Ross
    Again, I'm not pretending to present you with a handbook to what you ought to do. Others canpretend to that. What we have done over the course of this thread is examine in some detail the grammar around moral language. We have found that there are moral truths, and some examples have been given by myself and others.

    Not so far from here is a thread in which folk are doubting the existence of that world around them. Do you think that, though folk can doubt the chair in which they sit, that there is some ethical doctrin that will convince them all?

    No.

    You will have to do the work yourself.

    Within your view, please define 'fact'. For me, it definitely is a 'statement which refers to a stance-independently existing thing'. What world-to-word fit-style definition do you have for fact? — Bob Ross
    There is more than one way to use the word. I'm not too fussed which we use, provided that we keep track. The common feature is that "fact" is truth functionally equivalent to "true sentence", and this is how I mostly use the word. As has ben explained previously, problems occur when folk say "facts are only about physical things" but conclude "therefore there are no moral facts", as if this were an argument and not a tautology. The error comes to fruition when this is combined with the claim that "only facts are true" to conclude "there are no moral truths".

    This question begging is the generic form of the error in your OP and a few subsequent arguments.
  • When Does Philosophy Become Affectation?
    ↪Ciceronianus
    Folk seem curiously protective of their affectations.

    X19ZPhEAACIAd3slf140c581-c77f-4d51-8b41-ad5062e88070emperor.jpg
  • When Does Philosophy Become Affectation?
    You can't see ultraviolet — Hanover
    Fig61.jpg
    The image on the right was taken using film sensitive to reflected (not fluorescent) UV. The other is visible light.

    With a bit of help, we can see UV.
  • A Case for Moral Anti-realism
    Your response seems to boil down to this - some labels are ill-defined. — AmadeusD
    I've lost you somewhere.

    It's nothing to do with ill-defined definitions. It was about attempting to get a clear notion of what your word "subjective" was doing. The discussion got lost along the way.

    I'll take some solace from the fact that you are talking in terms of conventions, and maybe leave it there.
  • A Case for Moral Anti-realism
    ↪Bob Ross
    You've rejected P5 at P2. The two are inconsistent. You've defined states of affairs as having a word-to-world direction of fit, and hence as not including moral statements.


    There's more than one way to use (the word "fact"), sometimes folk use it to refer to any truth, sometimes, and especially sometimes when doing philosophy, only to those truths that have a direction of fit of word-to-world; the speaker is attempting to match there words to the way things are.

    Having two differing senses is fine, provided they are used consistently.

    What would be an error, and I think we can see this in the OP, would be to mix the two uses and think one had found an argument. To say that "facts" are only sentences about the material world, and that only facts are true, and therefore only sentences about the material world are true.     — Banno
  • A Case for Moral Anti-realism
    The symbolism "tree" or "plant" are customary as English-speakers have agreed to use them to refer, but they refer to an object, without custom, that has necessarily limited distribution. — AmadeusD
    yet
    A 'table' is merely a concept of mentation, attached, by custom, to objects with various and ill-defined forms and uses. — AmadeusD
    There's nothing here that helps us see a difference. One might as well claim:
    The symbolism table is customary as English-speakers have agreed to use it to refer, but they refer to an object, without custom, that has necessarily limited distribution
    and
    A 'tree' is merely a concept of mentation, attached, by custom, to objects with various and ill-defined forms and uses
    Is this supposedly the justification...?
    The fact of their constitution (wood, glass, resin(that one's murky) etc..) aren't liable to the same murkiness and so whether we think your object is a tree or plant can be, definitively, shown to be true or false with reference to the actual circumstances of its constitution. — AmadeusD
    The Dicksonia example shows the murkiness is right there - it's a tree but not a tree. What counts as a tree is an issue of convention.
  • Reason for believing in the existence of the world
    ↪Lionino
    Ah. You are new.

    Have a look at Austin: Sense and Sensibilia and When Does Philosophy Become Affectation?

    Cheers.
  • A Case for Moral Anti-realism
    ...how do we know we are actually abiding by the moral facts then? — Bob Ross
    One has to come to terms with how different, and how similar, moral statements are from physical statements.

    Analytic considerations, as I hope is clear from my part in this discussion, are not about what one ought to do in particular cases, but about the plumbing behind such considerations. we've I hope made some progress, in working out that there can be moral truths, and that one way to differentiate ethical statements is by their direction of fit.

    It would be a surprise if analytic considerations, or philosophical considerations generally, could tell us which statements about the physical world are true and which false. To do that one has to go out and engage with the world to make observations and talk to others about their observations and so on. By having a conversation. It's also a commonplace in the sciences to suppose that the statements we say are "true" are true only tentatively, open to revision.

    We might not expect analytic considerations to tell us which ethical statements are true and which false. We might expect that we work out which ethical statements are tire and which false again by engaging with the world, talking to others, by having a conversation. But in place of the word-to-world observations, we need a world-to-word direction of fit; that is, ethics is about doing things, about actions.

    Speaking roughly, perhaps we (in the plural, not "I") make ethical statements true by our enacting them. Not by making them the case, but by intending them to be the case and acting to that end. And again, what we consider to be true might well be revised on further consideration.

    So if what folk are after is a list of eternal moral verities, then I can't help them. but further, such a list would be mistaking "ought" for the "is" of the list.

    No grand moral programs; just a path.
  • A Case for Moral Anti-realism
    I would say this is true for objects which are customary, rather than symbolic (i.e 'table' is customary, 'tree' is symbolic) — AmadeusD

    How are we to tell which is which, in new cases?

    For example, the tree fern in the front yard... customary or symbolic? Note that it's a Dicksonia antarctica, and so not a tree; isn't not counting it as a tree a matter of convention?
  • Reason for believing in the existence of the world
    Good, you just happened to ignore the phrase that comes after it. — Lionino
    Not at all. There are now in your world, some things you can doubt and some things that it is silly to doubt. I'll count that as progress.

    So now the question arrises, what to doubt and what to believe?
  • A Case for Moral Anti-realism
    To my mind, that fact of any object being 'wood' is a fact about the object's constitution, not it's identity. — AmadeusD
    Ok, so your argument is that facts about an objects constitution are objective, but facts about an object's identity are subjective? And further we "discover" what things are constituted of, but we "perceive" their identity?
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