...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?

Wise move.

Believing that believing all belief is irrational, is irrational, is irrational. — Millard J Melnyk

What this shows is that the thread, and your attempted explanation, is hopelessly muddled.

Cheers.

...you still have not defined what you mean by sex and gender. — Bob Ross

You haven't, and perhaps can't, recognise the uses to which those terms are put, because it undermines your whole philosophy. Here it is again: "Sex" and "gender" can be used to differentiate between those characteristics that are biological and those that are social. You deny this, but unfortunately for you it is an obvious truth.

What you think of as a "gotcha" moment is actually your own undoing.

The way forward is extremely, painfully easy: recognise the distinction.

I distinguish epistemics from epistemology. — Millard J Melnyk

And?

I don't "distinguish epistemics from epistemology", so you are wrong?

You want your cake and to eat it, by supposing that belief and thought are both the same and yet different.

A belief is usually considered to be an attitude towards a sentence such that the sentence is held to be true.

A thought is something else entirely.

The objection I presented is that we can think something without believing it. It follows that belief and thought are not identical.

I don't see that you addressed this objection.

And again, more broadly, your conclusion is itself a belief: that belief is irrational. It follows that your argument is irrelevant to your conclusion, since your conclusion is irrational.

Believing all belief is irrational, is irrational.

So there seems to be something irrational about your conclusion.

Goodness, some logic.

Bet it doesn't help.

There'd be a naive objection along the lines that all Russell had done is avoid the issue by re-defining "future"; that the sentence "In the future, p will be in the past" is about the future - it's right there in the syntax.

Trouble is, this is just to give an alternate formal definition of "future" and "past", as if a sentence were "future" when the outermost tense operator is F. Russell's semantic definition gives us a general case that applies also to the Prior dichotomy, while also giving logical support to the intuition that what was true int he past need not be true in the future.

the syntactic version does not generalise, and does not explain why certain inferences do not work. And it is no surprise ot find that the surface syntax can mislead us as to the logical character of a sentence.

Existential crises as a reaction to trauma? A bit tangential, perhaps. While that might explain the motive, it doesn't resolve the incoherence.

Indeed.

Sounds strained.

This post exists.

We might proceed from that, without the constipation.

My apologies, Dogbert. There is a rash of really poor idealist tending OPs at the moment, and yours is one that caught my ire. It starts out wrong and goes astray from there.

Come on, ; if we can have the highest mountain, we can have the beingest being...

The next section shows the structural similarity between Prior's objection and Pp ⊨ FPp

That some sentence was true in past implies that in the future it that sentence will be true in the past. Prima facie, a derivation about the future from a premise about the past. But FPp is on Russell's account neither past nor future, and so Pp ⊨ FPp does not derive a sentence about the future from a sentence about the past.

The logic sets out the incoherence of the intuition.

Smoke doesn't repeatedly and insistently answer back with the same mistake.

:meh:

Downunder, our agrarian National Party just dropped its net zero emissions policy, while record-breaking storms dropped 9cm hail on some of the richest farmland in the country.

And so it goes.

Fragile masculinity, on some accounts. The need for control overwhelms rationality. In all truth some perhaps cannot see what is problematic in this view. The world simply must be ordered in the way he sees, no other option is available. Hence the faith in essences ordained by god, permitting him to divvy things up to suit his own self image.

Unnecessary psychologising on my part, of course. But it helps me make sense of such threads.

And yes, that is intended to be ironic.

[1] Epistemically, belief and thought are identical. — Millard J Melnyk

They are?

A believe is, one way or another, held to be true. But not all thoughts are held to be true. We can certainly entertain thoughts that are not true - that's were things like modality and error come from.

if your point is that we ought perhaps treat our beliefs with scepticism, that's not a bad view. But care needs to be taken - can you, for example, maintain scepticism as to the meaning of the words your post is written with, while you write it? Doin so would seem to undermine the very grounding of your scepticism.

Is your belief that you are now reading this sentence irrational?

All this by way of pointing to something a bit broader than just that your belief that "All belief is irrational" would thereby be irrational.

But further, we do construct social institutions, not by "I think..." so much as by "We will act in this way...". No individual can construct such a social institution by thinking it; but that is why they are social.

SO not seeing it.

There's clearly more going on with these people than mental illness. — ProtagoranSocratist

With the trans folk or the ones doing the anti-trans posting?

As @Tom Storm pointed out, Bob Ross is clearly here to justify his authoritarian, conservative politics in the best way he can, which is, not very well.

His motivation is political, and religious, not philosophical. He has a parochial, patriarchal, patriotic view of humanity, such that everyone everywhere ought fit some fantasy about 1950's middle class 'Merca.

It's mainly interesting because it is so sad, so limited.

In the end there's not much we can do for poor old Bob.

Existence is a brute fact and does not require "justification". — 180 Proof

Yep.
Existence is taken as granted, not demonstrated.

There's something extraordinarily compromised about a view that seeks to demonstrate "existence". There's even this:

Thus, to avoid circularity, it is necessary to posit a transcendent ground of being. — Dogbert

We can't begin with the existence of the chair you are sitting on, but we can necessarily "posit a transcendental ground of being".

This is such poor thinking it beggars belief.

I and others have tried to show that you have adopted a muddled approach to the topic. You appear not to have been able to see the problem with your approach.

Sex concerns biology, gender concerns social roles. But because of your religious beliefs, you wish there not to be such a distinction, so that you can maintain that biology necessarily determines ones sexual roles. You wrap all that up in a pretence of misunderstood neo- Aristotelian metaphysics in order to to kid yourself that ist has some merit.

It's all pretty tendentious. And after 15 pages, tedious.

I'm not very happy with your account. But if you will not explain, so be it.

Then my conclusion is that I've show that your argument is invalid.

Yes.

It's how you seem to have set up your argument.

Have you a valid variant?

So it was all to do with a lack of imagination in regard to sex acts.

Hopefully we can translate the structure of the proof into knitting, line by line.

"Suppose Γ is a satisfiable set of R-preserved sentences and $\delta$ is R-fragile."
Γ is the rows of some scarf that have already been knitted, while $\delta$ tells us about some arbitrary set of any rows at all.

"Let M be a model which satisfies Γ"
Let M be any scarf with the rows Γ already knitted.

"Either $\delta$ is true in M or it isn’t."
Either the rows described by $\delta$ will be added to M, or they won't.

"If it isn’t, then M is a counterexample showing that Γ⊭ $\delta$"
If the rows $\delta$ are not added to M, the the rows Γ could not have led us to conclude that they would be added.

"But if $\delta$ is true in M, then since $\delta$ is R-fragile there is some M' such that R(M,M') and $\delta$ is not true in M'."
But if the rows $\delta$ are added to the scarf, then since they might not have been added (they are fragile), there is some other scarf M' such that the rows $\delta$ were not added.

"Since each member of Γ was particular, each member of Γ is also true in M'."
Since the rows Γ have already been knitted, they are the same in both scarves. M' also has the rows Γ

"Hence M' is our counterexample, and Γ⊭ $\delta$."
In which case, the other scarf M' has the rows Γ but not the rows $\delta$, and so again, the rows Γ could not have led us to conclude that the rows described by $\delta$ would be added.


Clear as mud? There was a bit of trouble with the parsing, such that I had to use mathjax for the delta but not the Gamma. Odd. Let me know if it doesn't parse well.