The people inside the simulation were put inside the simulation late in life. — Michael

Then there's a fork, and a lot of ambiguity. Early on, it might be reasonable to say that they all start saying false things w/o realizing it (and indeed they'd recognize they'd been saying false things on waking up!) It might also be correct, tho, to say the use of the language changed via the changing circumstances, meaning they continue to say true things because the changed use, due to changed external circumstances, means changed truth conditions.

Either of these sounds plausible, and there's probably no hard fact of the matter about which obtains. Tho the longer you remain in the simulation, the more the 'truth-changing' scenario seems plausible as the use of the language genuinely changes.

Because realism, according to Dummett, requires truth to be bivalent. But truth is only bivalent if truth-conditions are recognition-transcendent, and meaning-as-use doesn't allow for recognition-transcendent truth conditions. — Michael

Again, I just don't see how it has anything to do with anything. Even in your simulation example, there can be facts about the simulation that are recognition-transcendent, too, and the lang. will potentially have truth conditions dealing w/ things beyond the simulation anyway. So the existence of a simulation is an irrelevancy.

I see nothing about bivalent truth or realism here – just an insistence that truth conditions have to deal only with things that language users recognize. So it's some kind of verificationist account of meaning & truth conditions, which as I've already argued in a couple points, is wrong (& if you don't believe those points, look up Fitch's knowability paradox).

[btw, even growing up in the simulation, it would be possible for language use to have relevance for things outside of it as well, even if the core of the truth conditions had to do with simulation-internal things. so for instance in referring to a simulation-tree, one would in fact be referring to a certain programmed object made of information of a certain sort, or whatever you like, though the ppl in the simulation might never figure this out. nonetheless in the context of the simulation, the tree is not 'informational.' thus a brilliant metaphysician in the simulation might realize that the tree is made of information, and utter something true by claiming that it is, even if no one else believed him, and even if he could never prove it! in fact many metaphysicians in our world make such claims!]

I'm not sure I follow. If the people grow up using the language in the simulation, then indeed the use of their language will result in its truth conditions having to do with things inside the simulation.

But so what? How does this show anything about realism? The truth conditions are what they are, and they depend on what they depend on (viz. happenings inside the simulation, which are still external matters). That there is also something going on outside the simulation is as irrelevant to the entire matter as if there were another reality beyond ours, that consisted not of the objects we speak about, but of something else entirely.

Perhaps this is your point – but I fail to see how it refutes, or has anything to do with, realism.

to say that the notion of truth involved is potentially recognition-transcendent is to say that (G) may be true (or false) even though there is no guarantee that we will be able, in principle, to recognise that that is so. — Michael

Why should we think that something's truth or falsity should always be recognizable? Surely there are things we get wrong without knowing it?

It doesn't say that the use of words has nothing to do with the world. It says that it has nothing to do with recognition-transcendent things. The recognised world is the world that has something to do with language use as it is that which influences and measures it. — Michael

This, if taken seriously, is tautological: swapping in the definitions for each other, we get: "language use has nothing to do with things that have nothing to do with language use." That's obvious and uninteresting, but surely you can't mean that, so I must be making a mistake somewhere in translation; but surely you see how that interpretation comes about from the above paragraph.

The more substantive claim seems to be something like: "it's not possible for language use to have to do with things we don't recognize [meaning what?]." Well, that's just false on a charitable construal: language use can conventionally allow us to make reference to all sorts of things we have little to no understanding of, and the truth conditions that follow may be ones we aren't equipped to figure out or deal with. For example, to use the word gold we need only isolate some substance by its extremely superficial properties – yet in doing so we refer to that substance, in all its chemical complexity, and can make true or false claims about it, even though we have no idea what that complexity is, or what it entails.

We can even not know what certain words mean, despite their use committing them to mean certain things – for instance, we may use 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus' to refer to the very same thing, yet not recognize we're doing so, and so fail to realize the words mean the very same thing.

our language use is identical in the situation that it does and in the situation that it doesn't, and that language use is all there is to meaning, and so nothing to do with their truth. — Michael

But language use isn't self-contained – use of a word to refer to a thing, for example, depends on the thing. If the word's use arises with respect to two different things, the usage is different – in one case it refers to one thing, and in another to the other. Again, you deny that it's about use having nothing to do with the world, but what else am I to make of your claim here? Different external circumstances, different uses.

What is a recognition-transcendent thing? What is a recognition-transcendent condition?

Is a recognition-transcendent condition a recognition-transcendent truth condition? Is a recognition-transcendent truth condition a truth condition where we can't figure out whether something is true or not? Or whether something makes it true that's beyond our capacity to figure out in some way? None of these seem to be a problem to me. Is there a way you can better convey why they seem to be a problem to you? If this doesn't adequately characterize what you mean, can you explain what recognition-trnascendence is in layman's terms?

The key Wittgensteinian thought that drives the argument is the idea that if we did suppose ourselves to be able to grasp a particular meaning for our words that attached to a recognition-transcendent condition then the whole practice of language use would go on the same even if we had got it wrong. But this, the argument goes, is to posit a difference that makes no difference. — Michael

This seems to say no more than that we might say things that are false and not realize it. So what?

I'm not quite sure what's being said, but it seems wrong. The idea that the use of words has nothing to do with the world is ridiculous on its face. Why believe it?

The poll here asked which philosopher was most important, not which one the taker most identified with.

0 isn't the null set {}, it's the cardinality of the null set, the number of elements of that set. — Srap Tasmaner

As I understand it, on the standard set-theoretic construction of the integers, it's both. The cardinality of a set is n just in case the set is equivalent to n, i.e. in the equivalence class of n consisting of all those sets that can be put into one-to-one correspondence with it. So the cardinality of the empty set is 0 because the empty set is 0, and it's trivially in a singleton equivalence class with itself.

2029? Seriously? 2029?

They're right.

Freedom from, freedom from – again, negative definitions. As far as positive democratic notions, I'm not sure what they have to do with religion.

I never said anything about belief. It has no content of any other sort, either.

He starts, of course, by saying what he does not believe, because the first thing he has to do is distinguish his position from the Evangelicals. — andrewk

Really? Might there not be another reason he begins with that?

Again, you just described negative things and lack of belief.

The Unitarian Church is an older entity than the UU Church. The latter has no commitment either to the existence or non-existence of a deity or deities of any sort.

What you just described was purely a lack of content.

How can a religion become increasingly liberal without ending up like UU? But UU is contentless. Q.E.D.

What does it mean to be liberal?

I literally cited an instance of the liberalization of Christianity resulting in it becoming contentless. UU is a contentless religion and it admits as much.

To be liberal is to be contentless – liberalism is defined in terms of lack of content, and permissiveness. You yourself in describing it only defined it in terms of losing facets of a substantive belief that it once had.

You cannot ignore the existence of UU – it's a historical reality.

Nor do I agree with the unsupported claim that liberal religions have no content. — andrewk

This is the logical endpoint of the liberalizing of Christianity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism

There is no content to UU that the wider secular culture does not provide (itself threadbare and defined negatively, in terms of tolerance).

Point 1 is a truism, but does not apply to liberal Christianity. There are plenty of flourishing liberal Christian congregations. — andrewk

Christianity in the western world is dying off, and liberal Christianity is basically atheism.

What is 'spiritual fulfilment'? This means different things to different people. — andrewk

Does it? People may have differing opinions on the matter. But part of the problem with the liberalization of religion is that a religion that has assimilated to a liberal society will fail to offer anything the wider society does not. And since liberal societies are by definition nihilistic, defined negatively in terms of their lack of values, this means a liberal religion will have very little meat to it. And so as you note, no one will stick around, because the religion no longer has any content.

Liberalisation of a religion destroys it only if one measures the success of the religion by numbers of members. — andrewk

1) A religion can't succeed with no members, or few enough that it has no cultural capital.

2) Liberalization in itself makes the religion less interesting in a liberal society, as it becomes just another wing of the larger secular culture. But religion is interesting precisely because it has content to it, and not as a consumer choice among a larger atheistic society that one takes it implicitly to be subordinate to.

Most people would instead measure the success of a religion by whether it brings spiritual fulfilment and community to those that are unable to find it elsewhere, without causing undue misery. — andrewk

What is spiritual fulfillment? Liberal religion can make one comfortable, but comfort and fulfillment aren't the same.

It doesn't seem like any particular ontological position is true just from looking at the world. In order for it to look a certain way, presumably visual (or whatever) evidence would give reason to believe it is that way. But not only does the way the world 'looks' not give conclusive evidence that some such thesis holds, it seems to give no reason for believing that at all, since all experience in ordinary life is equally compatible with an infinite number of ontological theses.

This may be true, but the assimilation of Christianity into modernity has to a large extent destroyed it. Hence the worry that the same would happen to Islam.

Every attempt to analyse Islam on the basis of theology and not in terms of sociology and politics is vacuous. — StreetlightX

Really jogs my noggin...

No it doesn't. It doesn't appear to be any particular way ontologically.

If so, then to exist is to be an element in the domain of discourse; roughly, to exist is to be spoken of. — Banno

To be an element of the domain of discourse and to be spoken of are not the same.

Why does it matter what term we use to label the fundamental substance of reality? — Harry Hindu

It doesn't matter what term you use, but that's not what's being discussed.

There are no reasons so far as I know to think that the nature of the mundane world is physical to begin with, in any substantive ontological sense (that is, if by 'physical' you don't just mean something banal, like things that take up empirical space) – this would need to be established prior to the further position that physical sort of stuff is 'all' there is.

It's generally taken for granted that physical things exist and everything else has to prove its existence. But this is a prejudice and so far as I can tell nothing supports it.

It is possible, in theory, to have reasons for assumptions. I doubt there are any reasons for the assumptions behind physicalist worldviews.

Again, the idea that nothing can be said about Islamic culture is simply not compelling.

Whether it's more useful to think of distinct Islamic cultures or Islamic culture as a whole depends on which one is asking questions about. The topic seems to be asking questions about the latter. Insisting on switching to the former seems to be a way of insisting that a claim can't be made for the general case because there are (potentially) exceptions to it.

It seems to me clearly wrong either to deny that there is an Islamic culture (however loosely it would have to be defined), or that it's analytically useful to ask questions about it.

I don't really have a stake in this, but I just want to note some fallacies SX has committed:

First, 'there are multiple Muslim cultures' does not imply 'there is no Muslim culture.'

Second, a generic claim can't be refuted by insisting on the negation of a universal.

Physicalism is not more parsimonious than idealism or any infinite number of other hypotheses.

It depends on your prior assumptions. Nothing qualifies as evidence simpliciter – but if you look at the priors, there's no evidence for them either, and so on.

All ordinary experience is perfectly compatible with everything being 'supernatural.' There's literally no reason to believe one or the other.

That's a one-sided description of what the Bible is.

Has philosophy impacted your view / interaction with the Scriptures in any way? For example has reading a particular philosopher / philosophy inclined you towards the Scriptures or got you interested in God? — Agustino

No. Generally scripture has made secular philosophy look weak by comparison. I'd been losing interest in philosophy for some time before, though.

A lot of changed assumptions, I guess. New respect for the value of tradition, less respect for the ideological fashions of the present. A wider scope that makes one's own problems seem less interesting and more surmountable.

The scriptures are revelatory. No outside decision as to their reliability needs to be made – reading them ingenuously on their own terms inclines one toward belief.