Bloody typical eh. Another Wittgenstein-Heidegger correspondence. : D

I'm a serial maker of muddy water, so I shall provide a perspective I don't believe anyone who has been tagged would provide, and perhaps would derail the thread if pursued.

There is an adage that truth is about the relationship of statements to the world. A statement will be true if its meaning is connected to the world in the right way; be that because what it means for a statement to be true is equivalent to a state of the world or alternatively a picture of it. Both of these set up a symbolic-linguistic relationship between language and world. Which is all well and good. But it isn't the start of the story. Why? It takes interpretation for granted.

In either case of construing truth as a symbolic-linguistic relationship of a statement to the world, there is a "word to world fit", how does it fit? Identity or a pictorial relationship. But what is it about statements that makes them able to have either an identity or pictorial relationship with states of affairs? Ultimately, a practical, perceptual engagement with the world which is reciprocal between utterer and world. Statements have a pictorial or identity relationship with states of affairs because they are designed to do so through how we inhabit our environments. That how is what embodies the fit of "word to world", and that how is us using our minds and bodies.

Ultimately then, what it means for a statement to be true is a derivative case of what it means for a relationship between a human and their environment to be in a certain way. Truth is produced through a way of engaging faithfully and perspicuously with the world and your own place in it, and in a reciprocal, adaptive and transformative manner. That production is also an interpretation of its environment; a symbolic-perceptual-linguistic one. It fits and makes fit language to world and world to language.

A statement will then count as true if its interpretation matches up with the world. Truth itself is in the non-linguistic (or only partially linguistic) relation of statement and world, not its relata. Thus it is something we do together.

There isn't much to engage with here @Art48, I'm going to close the thread. You could repost something similar where you make the analogies stronger by providing more detail on each.

Above taken from https://isaurssaurav.github.io/mathjax-table-generator/

Can also do it with mathjax:

$\begin{array} {|r|r|}\hline 0_0 & 0_1 & 0_2 & 0_3 & 0_4 & 0_5 & 0_6 & 0_7 & 0_8 & 0_9 \\ \hline 1_0 & 1_1 & 1_2 & 1_3 & 1_4 & 1_5 & 1_6 & 1_7 & 1_8 & 1_9 \\ \hline 2_0 & 2_1 & 2_2 & 2_3 & 2_4 & 2_5 & 2_6 & 2_7 & 2_8 & 2_9 \\ \hline \end{array}$

Which is:

@Art48 - I edited your post to contain a recent example from a thread. That is probably the easiest way of doing it. If you edit your post again you should see it.

I'm going to close the thread. It seems like current consensus is that there doesn't need to be a systemic change in how tone is policed in political discussions. There were a few times in recent memory where we perhaps intervened too late under the current ruleset. Maybe we can try and be quicker on the draw.

@Tate @skyblack

Stop.

Ah, you have nostalgia for Good old-fashioned Boys' Own Own Fisticuffs, eh? — Amity

Sarcasm doesn't transfer well over here. I intended that remark sarcastically.

There will always be passive aggression, usually, a coping mechanism to avoid direct confrontation. — Amity

Only allowing direct confrontation in a debate to those who express themselves temperately is much too high a bar I think. I would not want to moderate to that standard.

It's just far too much work to have the mods actually sorting the wheat from the chaff word by word, sentence by sentence, or even paragraph by paragraph. And I was never comfortable deciding whether a point was relevant or substantive -- I wanted to leave that to the community. — Srap Tasmaner

That was my experience too. I have never managed to intervene to get more aggressive style posters to post less aggressively long term. In each case either they were tolerated because it wasn't disruptive, or eventually warned/banned if it was.

I never deleted anything as irrelevant. Even the guideline to "stay on topic" struck me as ridiculous on this site, where every thread meanders into being about something else than the OP eventually, and I never enforced that.

Largely the same here. A couple of threads I've tried to keep strictly on topic before, it was a lot of work. It becomes more work the more on fire something gets.

Why edits?
It only makes the culprit look better than he/she is, if there is no reason given for it.
So not easy to identify any pattern.

Why not a simple warning? Why would a dialogue be necessary?
First Warning, 2nd... a process... — Amity

Edits because the majority of borderline cases at the minute do have substantive content in them, and if you go about warning people not to post with too aggressive a tone, you lose lots of substantive content.

When you moderate someone for the purposes of improving how they engage, you must give feedback. It isn't the case that everyone even knows how to engage civilly, consistently, when riled.

Like you, my concern has been with the perception of TPF by newcomers, but hey... sink or swim :roll: — Amity

Exactly like that comment. That would not be acceptable in a more academic and civil context. For now you'll get away with it because we tolerate some amount of aggression of tone and condescension. See what I mean?

In the world where such comments are moderated, I could indeed give you a warning to resort less easily to snark. That is why dialogue in such cases is necessary.

Yeah, and that's another piece of name-calling, innit? The not-cool look :wink: — Amity

It isn't a crappy job because it's not cool, it's a crappy job because it rarely works, tends to escalate an aggressive poster's habits, and means that either you end up managing someone's content and emotions at the same time as watching their posts more carefully. It's a lot more work for an extremely rare payoff, and often an extremely unpleasant series of exchanges.

We very much appreciate this input. — Hanover

:up:

The question is whether we need a rule change (as you suggest) for political threads, or do we just need to acknowledge we didn't properly enforce that thread. That's the ongoing discussion. — Hanover

I've not made up my mind on it yet, never actually have. Personal thoughts:

For tighter standards on inflammatory posts in political discussions:
( 1 ) Might make a more inclusive atmosphere in those threads. People don't tend to intervene in shouty bar arguments, is shouty bar academic argument the wanted vibe for political discussion here?
( 2 ) Might make the overall level of content in the discussion better and lower the average blood pressure on those threads, a sort of 'public health' intervention.
( 3 ) Aggressive atmospheres arguably impact marginalised and socially nervous voices the most.

Against:
( 1 ) Is it possible to consistently enforce tighter standards on it in general? As @unenlightened said, there's extreme ambiguity once you remove the clear cut "just flaming" posts. I suspect that tighter standards promote the passive aggression of academic discourse rather than good old fashioned accusatory tirades and insulting comments.
( 2 ) It's considerably more effort to enforce tighter standards about a thing. Especially so here. The kind of mod actions being discussed would typically be edits rather than deletes - dialogues regarding conduct rather than warnings. That's a lot more work. I doubt anyone actually wants the job of going through every post of every political thread and trying to hold it to a consistent editorial standard.
( 3 ) Excluding intemperate voices in political discussion is its own form of exclusion; I personally want people to be able to express anger in political discussion, with representatives of positions which make them angry. I don't know how to editorialise anger in debate without running into all the ambiguities regarding its expression.

Your view is apparently different. — Tate

My view isn't different. See here for an explanation. I'm closing the thread now.

hear what you are saying, but I believe such behavior should be called out and challenged publicly, not in some forgotten and invisible corner of this forum. — Tzeentch

You can also PM other staff to get us to raise things. That tends to work too.

Moderators should be expected to act with a degree of impartiality and proper conduct. — Tzeentch

Yes.

Additionally, I find it hard to see how you characterize my (well-deserved) poke at Xtrix as a 'clear insult', and see no issue with a page-long beatdown he launched at another poster. — Tzeentch

I had the pleasure of reading the exchanges and saw little beyond two articulate people having an inflamed discussion about a sensitive topic. I think the only consistent way of dealing with the aggressive exchanges in political discussions is something like what @Amity suggested, but that comes with its own issues.

Xtrix was condescending and insulting for pages to another poster named "God must be an atheist',then Tzeentch interjected one joke. — Tate

We've gone through why it was modded before. Do you have anything else to add?

Xtrix was condescending and insulting for pages to another poster named "God must be an atheist',then Tzeentch interjected one joke. — Tate

As of now, getting shirty and frustrated with each other with political discussions is treated lightly, so long as there's also content in the posts. I have explained that this conduct is generally seen as okay here.

That is a concrete suggestion, and is a rule we try to follow. We don't always follow it as we don't always have more than one person online. If I was online, I would've yeeted @Tzeentch's comment too. While that doesn't make the conflict of interest go away, the only choices you have when you're in such a position are:

( 1 ) Leaving a post up that could clearly be deleted on grounds for just being insulting and not contributing anything to the thread. This is neglectful.
( 2 ) Deleting the post. This is a conflict of interest.

You will notice that either way you will disappoint someone.

And it's ok for Xtrix to insult people, but no one may respond? — Tate

If that was what actually happened, it would not be okay. But this is a leading question. Please see the rest of the thread for an appraisal of why the actions taken were taken and more detail on the context.

I don't see why my participation in that thread has anything to do with calling moderators out on disrespectful behavior. — Tzeentch

This is the place to do that, constructively. Not with an insult in thread. You will notice that your comment calling @Xtrix disrespectful in feedback will not be deleted and is fair game, whereas your comment in the Climate Change thread I believe was permissible to delete.

Feedback is the place to confront mods with criticism of their conduct, not in thread.

I will bring this up with other mods.

Is this really ok with you folks? — Tate

Deleting a joke may have been okay, depending on the context. This was clearly participating largelt to make a snide remark.

Ideally a mod doesn't moderate people they're currently chatting with, but in that case I think it's permissible. It was a clear call.

Makes sense. Cheers.

Yeah it looks like that from the change log. Even more reason for deletion, it was joining in a discussion to make a snide comment about another poster. @Tate - if I were online at the time of the deletion, I would've made the same call. I hope this clears it up.

Just to be clear: Tzeentch wasn't involved in any of the discussions. It was just done in response to another discussion about politics, apparently. — Xtrix

Was that the only remark by @Tzeentch up until that point, engaged with you, in thread?

The first sentence was good, the second not so much. I suggest going AFK for a bit to cool off.

I checked the change log for this. The context of it, though please correct me if I am wrong @Tate @Xtrix @Tzeentch is that you were all involved in a highly inflamed discussion about climate change.

I can see from some of @Xtrix's posts that they have been condescending in part. In context, to me it read like a passive aggressive retort to Xtrix's claim, rather than a factual one. You missed the emoji ":snicker" from "I have a hard time believing that :snicker:". That made the post just an insult, rather than an insult in context.

In political discussions, we have a much lighter touch on vitriol and inflamed tempers - so long as the post isn't just vitriol and inflamed tempers, and seeks to contextualise those things, we tend not to judge it as harshly. Please see the exchange between @god must be atheista and Xtrix in thread for an example. If the exchange of tirades was taken out of context, it may be deleted.

Posts which consist just of insults generally get deleted, flagged etc.

@Tzeentch @Tate
Take it to feedback please.

One thing that bothers me a little is that the model seems very broadly applicable, which may be a strength, but means we might be missing something specific to knowledge. I think I could read most of what you wrote as applying to, say, rational belief. (And possibly to a great number of other things, ethical questions and so on.) Would you say there's a point in here that is specific to knowledge? — Srap Tasmaner

I don't know if there's anything specific to knowledge in it. I also don't know if there's anything which distinguishes knowledge from (placehlder) produced by/enacted in a 'successful connection to the world' - because we use 'to know' as a summary of perception, as well as for synthesis of perceptions and judgements (counting), as well as for practical activities (know how to ride a bike).

Maybe something that would make it more specific to knowledge would focus on objectivity (like this thread does here), what is it that makes social practices generalisable, knowledge-productive and binding (deemed to know if enacted)?

One thing I've been trying to capture is that there's something a little arbitrary about knowledge. If I know because I was there, even by chance, and you don't because you weren't, that's just the way it is. If I happened to look up and see the balloon before it went behind the trees, I know there was a balloon and you can only take my word for it or not, even if you were walking along beside me. — Srap Tasmaner

There's something almost arbitrary about a process of knowledge production, yeah. It could be a case of 'garbage in, garbage out'. If you can declare a prior reality as fixed by taking something as knowledge, taking a position in the space of reasons - a 'save game' as you helpfully put it -, if there are errors in the save game, treating them as knowledge has the capacity to make them part of social reality. It can be that a factual error propagates and itself gets ritualised, or a faulty connection to the state of things is sanctified.

I've been envious of people who are prone to certainty in their convictions and actions for a while, to me it seems they have the ability to conjure social reality around them; no matter how distorted it is! Maybe this is the same thing.

But it's evident that we can judge whether a given candidate for a rite is knowledge producing. "You don't find out how many we have in the store by checking the receiving logs; you have to go and count them." What's going on there? I could claim that we are relying on a pre-existing understanding of knowledge to judge whether a rite works -- but it also looks like I'm proposing an alternative rite already known to work. — Srap Tasmaner

I particularly like the bolded bit. If I understand what you're saying right, we clearly have a somewhat generic ability to assess whether a given rite is appropriate for producing a given item of knowledge. You gotta count to get the number, you don't check the acquired stock.

You gotta follow the bug back from what's producing it, not start somewhere random. You check if the shirt button is sufficiently fastened by inspecting if it's through the button hole, not by pulling your shirt down.

Each of those instances had a failure mode, a break in connection of the proposed conduct with the goal's item. I don't think it's possible to specify generic content of a failure mode that breaks the connection, but it seems to be possible to say that the connection of the rite from the desired knowledge item is severed. In that regard perhaps a rite fails when it is sufficiently severed from its desired knowledge item.

Now why I particularly liked the bolded bit is because it seems like you've caught a productive ambiguity in how this works. In retrospect it appears the rites are given, like they're an a-priori, but they also seem to be modified and passed on in the act of examining the rite. I'd never thought about the example of counting items in a store vs checking just the receiving logs before, but when I read it it's clearly a successful rite. The pre-existing understanding seems to be what semantic and epistemic resources an individual (or collective) can draw on while either creating or enacting a rite; the prior context of interpretation. But when using the prior context for interpretation, it is difficult to tell what is prior context and what is created synthetically in the act. A kind of alchemy of a particular event into an instance of, or failure to satisfy, a candidate practice for producing knowledge.

One thing I think I'm resisting here is the suggestion (derived from Sellars) that "I know ..." is not really a factual claim at all, but an offer to defend or to justify my claim, to enter the space of reasons. In "I know X because Y," I'm not taking Y as being my justification or my warrant for claiming that X. I'm thinking of X and Y as being more intimately related than that. If I lack one justification, I might have another. You can swap out Y's. Reasons are things you can "come up with". The Y I'm interested in is not something like the basis for an inference, but more like an explication of what sense in which I'm using the word "know". — Srap Tasmaner

I think I agree with that, and I want to 'yes, and' it. The "I know" when someone says "I know" in a context of justification isn't just an epistemic move in the game; it's staking yourself on the prior epistemic moves. Manoeuvring yourself into a position where you expect to be deemed to know.

I am willing to bet that the expectation there falls on the trust of a previously enacted rite; that it was conducted appropriately and an appropriate rite. But not explicated in those terms, it's taken on trust. I think this is an intimately related phenomenon to the one you reference here:

Knowledge of this sort is detachable from the reasons supporting it. When questioned, you have to check to see if you kept the original reasons; if you did, you have to reconstruct the inference, and if you didn't then you have to reconstruct the whole thing. Maybe it'll turn out your reasons weren't solid, or your inference was faulty. That happens. But in treating, let's just say it, such a belief as knowledge, you're in a way committed to not needing reasons for it anymore. It's a new save point you can treat as as-far-back-as-I-need-to-go. — Srap Tasmaner

Being able to declare a position (analogous to "I expect to be deemed to know (in virtue of this or that rite)") I think is also to declare that the position itself is valid, because its constitutive steps have been ensured by (expecting yourself to be) following a trusted rite.

That trust seems to be irreducibly social - insofar as it pertains to common access to a shared environment. but also irreducibly entity focussed - because the entities are shared in the that environment. It is simultaneously an elevation of environmental patterns into socialised principles of associations and a matching of socialised principles to patterns; for following a pattern to success or failure in a rite.

So it turns out the canonical "situation" is not just the environment but involves quite about you, whether you have the capacity to acquire the knowledge available, whether you are receptive to it, and so on. Whether you were paying attention -- that one matters quite a bit. All of that goes into what we can't help but keep calling "being connected to reality the right way" to acquire knowledge. Or we could say that there are ways of interacting with your environment that are knowing ways and ways that aren't. Conducting surveillance is putting yourself in a position to know, and conducting experiments is creating situations where you can be in a position to know. Some of the difficulty of carrying off the acquisition of knowledge is not knowing enough to design those situations; you have only your current capacity to rely on in making the design, and if that's inadequate you might get an interesting result but not know it (the CMB story), or you might force the results to conform to your pre-existing knowledge, misinterpreting rather than simply missing the novelty. — Srap Tasmaner

I think that's quite perceptive. The only contributions I have here are muddying the waters further and joining you in rambling. I agree with you that it's the case that a 'canonical situation' is required. As a tentative estimate of what a canonical situation is, I think it's an implicitly known set of context appropriate rules for generating a specific type of knowledge when it is engaged. If someone was in an such a relation to some knowledge item, they can be deemed to have known it. It is like participation in a rite.

I also think you're right with the claim that engendering a situation where something can come to be known (and what might block that situation) is a skill in itself. A kind of epistemology of contextual knowledge production, rather than one of linking statements to conditions of satisfaction through idealised argument. I might be able to design those situations for code - like finding a bug in a system I know well enough - but not others - like finding confounding variables in an experiment in neurology. I can perform some rites but not others.

In some respect, though, it doesn't matter that I can do those things, what would make the produced facts, claims, knowledge etc seems also to need to be generic and or/generalisable. You can't 'just know', even if you really truly know. The working needs to be able to be shown. I think we often take on trust that the working could be shown if needed. Like if I tell you I went to Lidl today, you'd probably take that as a fact and not even wonder if in fact I'd gone to Aldi, or even think about how I knew it was a Lidl. You can doubt whether I have performed the rite or not, but since most rites are taken on trust, you will take it on trust that I've performed the rite.

In that regard, it seems 'the collective' becomes acquainted and takes as a given a collection of rites of knowledge production, which trigger in certain contexts. You'd have no reason to doubt that I went to Lidl instead of Aldi today, unless I told you another time that I get the two confused all the time - and in that manner you'd be able to sensibly doubt that I was following the right rule of knowledge production to know I went to Lidl. I may have forgotten that I went to Aldi instead of Lidl, but I could sensibly be deemed to have known it under the trust that I had the capability to perform the appropriate rite.

Do you think something similar is going on with your dad hiding the eggs scenario? Insofar as dad performed a rite (placing the eggs) that makes him deem-able to know where the eggs are. Even if you ask him later and he forgot.

When someone justifies a knowledge claim like "I know where they are because I saw him put them there", what makes the "because" function as a justification is ultimately a (trusted) appeal to a connection between location knowledge of objects and sight of the person, which is a common rite of knowledge production regarding the location of objects.

When a person seeks to know something, I think you're right that they'll try to enter 'a state' in which they can come to know it. I think the production of that state is the successful performance of an implicitly sanctioned rite.

As an aside, I don't think the rites themselves can be true or false, only more or less accurate, more or less fit for task. It isn't like "I know where they are because I saw him put them there" has an easy parsing in terms of logic In that regard, the connection to reality which is ascribed to genuinely productive states of knowledge is effectively a sanctioning of that rite through (again publicly deemed) sufficient accuracy/reliability/fitness for task.

Someone who always thinks it's 3 o'clock will be right twice a day, but we couldn't say that they know it. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm going to keep mulling over this "situation" business. I've always wanted to say that a key element of knowing is being in a position to know, despite the evident circularity. I might find a way to make that do some work. — Srap Tasmaner

I think that's an interesting example that gets at something quite basic about epistemic certainty being required for knowledge. If you add the condition that the person who always thinks it's 3 o clock also has a disorder which makes them see the display as 15:00, they would have the psychological certainty. they'd have a paradigm example of epistemic connection to the knowledge through their own perception (if an arbitrary person saw that, they would know), but we'd still want to reject that they know that it's 3 o-clock when it's 3 o-clock because their connection to reality itself is also evincing the claim that it's 3 o-clock by accident.

One of the issues this may create for an account regarding communal standards of epistemic certainty is that we'd still need to be able to preclude instances like the above, in which certain people would be excluded from counting as knowing things due to the facts about them precluding an appropriate access to reality (in some collection of scenarios).

You also couldn't establish the reason that their knowledge isn't knowledge if you happened to assess them at 3 o'clock using the same clock as them without other knowledge, since a non-disordered observer would be able to make claims of the same standard about the perceptual event regarding the clock. They'd both see it, they'd both be certain, the only difference is their position in the broader web of knowledge having norms.

@Andrew M

Thus to fix the problem, it is not just about providing better information. It is about redesigning the very psychology at work in “tackling the threat”. — apokrisis

Just taxing carbon could have done the trick. But politics is too corrupted by industry. We’re fucked I’m afraid. — apokrisis

:up: Successfully taxing carbon would've worked I think. When regulation's actually been enforced, production tends to catch up right? And as you say, regulatory capture's fucked that avenue. I don't think there's a viable political project at this point to "save us" from the climate catastrophe.

Maybe the conditions for such a movement will evolve when climate refugees become sufficiently commonplace in the global economic centres, and the greenery in those lands becomes prohibitively on fire. Basically, we're fucked at least until the fucking starts, then there'll be a period of collective trauma which is an opportunity for us to refashion ourselves.

Unfortunately, brazenly and forcefully sticking to previously established routines is a common response. If the bookies would offer odds on such a thing, and be able to pay out, 'during the middle of the end', I'd bet a chunk on the creation of privately owned but state managed 'climate safe havens' being developed with quite restrictive access. An intensification of the climate risk disparity over the globe.

I don't know if the climate change will prohibit the mass production of food required to keep industrial civilisation running, and it may already be beyond that tipping point. I envision fenced corporate-state communities protected by renewably powered drones as those inside are the last to starve and burn.

Edit: With reference to the OP, yes religion and media causes harmful thought habits, but they aren't a primary driver of the biggest harms. They're symbionts for a bigger systemic clusterfuck host.

Brandom likes to talk about taking true and making true, belief and action. — igjugarjuk

Just some remarks. Largely unstructured. Allegedly Brandom seeks

"the transcendental conditions of the possibility of determinately contentful conceptual norms"

Which is a lot of qualifiers for a main goal of a piece.
( 1 ) Transcendental. There's statement in the essay which uses it:

In his view, if we are to assert, intelligibly, that we know something, we must take it that the conceptual form things have for thought represents the way they are in themselves. This is a transcendental, indeed semantic, claim about what it means to "know", or be conscious of, something; it is not a direct claim about being itself.

(though this is the author rather than Brandom)

A transcendental claim then seems to be claim about what must (logically? a-priori?) be true in order for the state of ourselves, our environs etc to be intelligible and capable of having the properties that they do. It's a structural claim, rather than a functional one.

( 2 ) conditions of possibility. That seems to be the way of fleshing out the relationship of (something... us?) the structural underpinnings of 'determinately contentful conceptual norms' to the determinately contentful conceptual norms themselves. Don't know how the conditions of possibility condition (as a verb) the determinately contentful conceptual norms either - is it (allegedly) an empirical fact that they do or an a-priori one?

( 3 ) determinately contentful. That has an exegesis in paper.

This is the claim that "to be conceptually contentful is to stand in relations of material incompatibility and consequence . . . to other such contentful items" (p. 666) -- relations of what Brandom elsewhere calls "material inference". In saying this, Brandom has in mind empirical concepts, rather than logical ones. The latter are also inferentially related, but empirical concepts stand in relations of material inference, because their empirical contents acquire determinacy through excluding and including other such contents.

Determinately contentful conceptual norms are those conceptual norms which concern empirical rather than logical concepts. Like if I eat a spoiled egg I'll feel crap. What seems to make the norm determinately rather than conceptually contentful is the relationship of events/states of affairs to each other ('material inference') rather than 'logical ones'. I imagine that relations of material inference can only be learned with reference to, or in derivation from, stuff which has been seen and done.

I believe there's an ambiguity in the way I've presented the relationships of material inference referenced in the paper, because it's unclear over whether they are natural successions of events/dynamical flows of environments ('mind independent') or whether they are bodily/mental constructions instantiated in people that represent natural successions of events ("mind dependent"). I also believe that the ambiguity comes from holding the distinction between mind dependent and mind independent on the crucible of mental states - construed as patterns of the psyche. On that there's a quote in the article about where Brandom begins his case for his goal.

Brandom's aim is (among other things) to set out "the transcendental conditions of the possibility of determinately contentful conceptual norms" (p. 532), and the place from which he starts is the "nonpsychological conception of the conceptual"

And in that regard reading those relationships of conceptual inference, whether material or nonmaterial, as psychological events will probably be a misreading.

Instead of mind(internal) and world(external), Brandom seems to use another coordinate system for the space of reasons, the subjective and the objective. Which he has a special sense for.

Brandom's next claim is that conceptual contents take two forms: subjective and objective. Their subjective form articulates what things are for consciousness, or how they appear to us. Their objective form, by contrast, articulates what things are in themselves -- the form of empirical reality or "objective facts". For Brandom, therefore, both reality and thought are "in conceptual shape" -- a view he calls "conceptual realism". Note, however, that Brandom claims no direct access to reality, but he bases his conceptual realism on what is required for knowledge to be intelligible. In his view, if we are to assert, intelligibly, that we know something, we must take it that the conceptual form things have for thought represents the way they are in themselves. This is a transcendental, indeed semantic, claim about what it means to "know", or be conscious of, something; it is not a direct claim about being itself. Note that conceptual realism does not explain how knowing subjects come to distinguish what is real from what is mere appearance (from their perspective). It is simply the thesis that subjective and objective conceptual contents must be understood as "the two poles of the intentional nexus"

Subjective is what things are 'for us' and objective is what things are 'in themselves' - with the clarifying comment that things as they are in themselves are 'the form of empirical reality'. Presumably this is the constellation of material inferences+events which plays a representational role in how we do stuff. I think this is evinced by:

we must take it that the conceptual form things have for thought represents the way they are in themselves.

Another interesting highlight is the Brandom quote that the content of subjective and objective concepts form 'two poles of the intentional nexus' . Will assume this means oppositional poles, like north and south, rather than points of attraction/guidance. I suppose it could also be a 'yes and', since both poles are guiding norms!

My brain has now stopped working. I am now crowdsourcing exegesis on how objective norms are binding.

The bannings thread gets closed when the discussion in it ceases to be productive and about bannings. If I was paying attention I probably would have closed it sooner with a similar message to this.

If you have specific points of criticism about @Xtrix or any other mod/admin conduct, please make a thread about it here in feedback.

Closing the bannings thread is a different call (and I believe was done by a different mod) from any criticism you might want to direct toward @Xtrix 's conduct.

I'm closing this one now.

As such a government, in conscripting, is taking away a meaningful choice over what outcomes a person wants to contribute toward and imposing a very severe burden in doing so. I don't think there's any precedent for that. — Isaac

I think that's a solid argument sketch for the claim that conscription isn't just unless (insert caveats here). And that makes sense of the sub argument regarding harm trade offs of being ruled by Russia vs being ruled by Ukraine.

There is a bit of an equivocation there though, the expanded conscription in that instance is a response to invasion, and so the trade off ought turn on the disruptive consequences of unresisted or successful invasion rather than the steady state of an established government's qualify of life statistics. If you took the measure in contested territory, those measures would go down.

However, I think your argument does hit more home against conscription in the abstract, in which an abstract trade off between the suffering of surrender+politics vs the imposition of individual suffering that is conscription. That bears on whether it's a permissible continuous government policy. I say permissible rather than just there because the ground for conscription being 'okay in the abstract' isn't that it's just in every case, it's that it's not unjust in some cases (permissible).

Can you think of a case where conscription wouldn't be unjust? (By that I don't mean that it would be just, I mean that it could be like meh rather than hell yeah or the devil)

Though that may be weakened by the extent to which an individual is obliged, through social embedding, to defend something which is worth defending from the real risk of its waning or destruction. How much of that is a romantic attachment to a culture being rationalised remains to be seen, in each case (like _db and their Graeber quote said below)

I guess the logic is that by living in a country, you enjoy all the benefits provided by it, and that if the country's existence is threatened, you owe it to the country as your duty to fight and possibly die in order to preserve it. You're a selfish cowardly traitor if you don't. — _db

It can be just to war and wrong to conscript. If there's an argument that in a specific case the only way to fight would be to conscript, then the justness of conscription might follow. But that itself, and the inference, would need to be demonstrated.

In general it seems you lot are discussing whether it would be better for Ukraine to be occupied by Russia than not, and leaving both the conscription issue (is any conscription just? and is this conscription just?) and the inference from just resistance to just conscription (in this case and in general) unexamined.

Just fight implies just conscription, why and why here?

@Isaac

You both derailed the thread by getting into a condescending insult spiral. Any complaints, take it to PMs or feedback, not here.

@Isaac, @Olivier5

Stop this.

:fire:

Let's leave it at that then. :up:

Does it really need to be said that you're massively oversimplify the enculturation of multiculturalism in the political north by tying it to the work of a philosopher obscure even among graduates of philosophy?

:naughty:

I fite you.

I'm aware, by the sounds of it you're highlighting that enframing vs phusis/physis in QCT is a continuation of the discussion of propositional vs hermeneutical as structures in previous work (see Logic the Question of Truth Part 1 a). Which is an important point. I don't think focussing entirely on that continuity in your analysis is an appropriate thematisation to get political implications out of Heidegger's thought, though, effectively focussing on the wrong thing in an occlusive way. This is a similar point, to my understanding, as Levinas' ethical charge against Heidegger - too much focus on ontology makes you forget the world. By highlighting that Levinas perhaps had an inadequate understanding of the ontological aspects of Heidegger's ontology in response to someone highlighting a political implication of his ontology, it looks to me like you're making a similar move to the one criticised.

Why not both? Why not a continuation of the discussion from previous work which also betrays some easily co-optable nostalgia? You've done a good job of highlighting another aspect of what it is, not undermining the points I've made. Perhaps it wasn't your intention to undermine the political dimension of this I highlighted after all.

I don't know why they were banned. That one looks like a requested deletion rather than a punitive banning, though. I don't recall that person ever breaking rules or being an arse.