So either the statement "the particle will be at position p at time t" isn't either true or false or something other than a reference to the laws of nature is required to explain its truth value. — Michael

Do laws of nature preclude probabilistic outcomes? The coin flip is 50/50. I can predict that in advance. But what makes it 50/50?

It goes to the question of what's behind probability in the world. Saying it's uncaused doesn't explain anything. Why 50/50 and not some other probability?

Even though the Calvinist would claim to see some goodness, they would claim that the goodness is ultimately in God, of whom we cannot ultimately understand. — Chany

I think the Calvinists make a better argument regarding God's sovereignty (or omni-nature), but it still has the problem of redefining the good to be a non-human concept. Which you can do, but the cost is that the meaning shifts.

God is all-good. Meaning, God is all-good in a way we don't understand. Which could easily apply to a God who loves torture, or anything at all, since we're no longer dealing with human conceptions of good.

That's not a "good" solution to the problem of evil, and it's easy to parody with an evil God.

The good needs to be understood independent of God, or else you end saying nothing of meaningful about the good. Good ends up being whatever God happens to be, which could be anything.

Hume's claim is that we don't see causation. We only see invariant correlation, and then infer causation – and that this inference isn't deduction. — Michael

When Hume notes that inference isn't deduction, was his conclusion that we can't know that causation exists, because it's inferential, or just that we can be wrong about what causes what?

And what was this in reaction to? Did the rationalists think we could deduce causation?

(This is somewhat side-tracking us from the problem of counterfactuals raised in the OP) — Pierre-Normand

Alright, so to get back on track, what makes a counterfactual true for a deflationary theorist? If Pierce had dropped the stone during a lecture, it would have fallen. That's a true statement, correct?

Many deflationary theorists may only make some minimalist formal points about the semantics of "... is true", and hence aren't committed to any sort of metaphysics or epistemology. — Pierre-Normand

So what is the point of deflationary truth? That there is nothing metaphysically significant about truth or propositions? So all one needs to do is give a decent account of knowing, and I suppose some account of how language works, or cognition, and that's all there is to it?

I don't think you meant to say "makes the sentence white", but rather "makes the sentence true". — Pierre-Normand

I fixed it after re-reading. But kind of interesting typo. The white from the snow gets into the sentence to make it true, or something! Just kidding, or not, given some of the epic discussions on truth and perception from the old forum.

But I think they do, by means of broadly Kantian accounts of (intuition dependent) conceptual abilities and theories of judgment. — Pierre-Normand

I see. So a deflationary view of truth is based on Kantian categories of thought, or can be.

A deflationary theorist can make a further move and say, just go outside and look and you'll see that the snow is white. And indeed we will, if it is white. But that just puts us back into naive realism, before accounting for the problem of perception, questions of skepticism, consciousness, the mind/body problem, and anything else that might be a problem for knowing about states of affairs.

But she doesn't claim this to imply that there must exist two metaphysically distinct sorts of things -- abstract propositions on the one side, and concrete elements of reality (i.e. states of affair) on the other side -- that somehow problematically correspond to one another. — Pierre-Normand

She doesn't, but that doesn't change the fact that you have a sentence in a human language on one side and the state of affairs which makes the sentence true on the other. And so the question is still how the snow being white makes the sentence true, because a sentence isn't a state of affairs, no matter what theory of truth one espouses.

So deflationary theorists still have to account for how we know that the snow is white.

Eternal hell doesn't square with a perfectly good God.

The Calvinists make a good point about free will. How can God be sovereign and not in control of where people end up for eternity? You can't have it both ways.

Their problem is that the then have to reconcile the perfect good with God predestining who is damned.

What about a statement about some future (or hypothetical) quantum event? — Michael

The probability can be known in advance. Changing from determinism to probability doesn't change the fact that there is an apparent order to events, because what makes the probabilities come out the way they do?

We're just creatures. Inherently, and when we are wronged, or we see others wronged, part of us wishes to pay back that suffering and pain a thousand fold -- but those that hurt us are just people, that themselves were hurt, and now fear monsters. There are no monsters though, just people. — Wosret

I don't know about that. Some people hurt others because they like it, or they want power and money, or their ideological belief requires it. Not everyone feels empathy, or cares about consequences.

Mental construction is causative. It's the same as saying that causation is a habit of thought.

I don't know. Can't say I've given it much thought before.

Obviously, sex with a goat is to be preferred over child-rape. — Bitter Crank

Didn't think I'd ever see that said on here. LOL.

It's really hard to get the damn dog to hold still even when I tune him, let alone when I try an arpeggio. — Brainglitch

>:O

Past experience is an excellent guide, assuming contiguity past to future. But the challenge was to support this assumption. — Mongrel

Is the problem related to causality? If we knew that the sun would be caused to shine for billions more years, then it wouldn't make sense to say it's possible it might stop shining tomorrow.

And that is what we think is the case. The sun has the matter it needs to do fusion for a long time. In order for that not to be the case, nuclear physics would have to change. We have no basis on which to suppose to suppose that hydrogen would stop fusing under the sun's gravity, or that gravity would change.

Why think any of that is the case? Because it makes sense of the sun shining for billions of years. Otherwise, it's just one unconnected moment to the next, where the sun just happened to shine for all that time.

For example, only if we have an impoverished view of perception are we tempted to think that we can't see one thing causing another — The Great Whatever

Why did Hume think we couldn't perceive causation? Because we only see the constant conjunction and not the underlying cause? Hume assumed that if there is such thing as causation, it had to be something unperceived.

Was that because we're sometimes wrong in assuming that A necessitates B, when it was really C that necessitates B?

Seems like since Hume most people have taken it for granted that we don't perceive causation. Either it's a habit of mind (which is contradictory since habits are causal as pointed out by Csalisbury), or it's something real, but unperceivable, like universals or laws of nature, which aren't empirical.

But what if one took a different tract and argued that we do perceive causation?

Yes. To say that humans are poor at philosophy assumes some ideal way of doing philosophy that humans are not attaining. It's like saying that all humans are poor at basketball, despite players such as Michael Jordan. It presupposes some ideal philosopher (or basketball player) that no human can match. — Luke

I'm not considering the ideal. It's a comparison with other human abilities. We're naturally good at language and storytelling. Math and logic are harder for us to be good at. Memory recall is rather poor, when it comes to accuracy.

Colin McGinn in discussing the possibility that we're cognitively closed to certain philosophical answers mentioned that we're very good at technology, but there could be another intelligent species out there that's the reverse. Where they're as good at doing philosophy as we are at tool making. It's not that they would be perfect philosophers, just good at it.

It's like saying humans are bad at reasoning. No, we're very bloody good at it actually compared to every other life form we know of. — Baden

Some cognitive scientists have stated that we are bad at reasoning. That we're better than other animals is like saying I'm better at playing the violin than a dog.

But if no humans mastered playing the violin, despite putting in the effort, then we would conclude that humans are bad at playing the violin. What would be the comparison? Other instruments.

But it's easy enough to find things we are uncontroversially bad at. Crunching big numbers, memory accuracy, repetitive perfection - stuff that computers are very good at. Now you might argue that there's the comparison, but computers were made because we're bad at those things. Computers used to be human calculators. It wasn't impossible with lots of people to do heavy duty calculations, it's just inefficient and error prone.

then say someone like Wittgenstein, who ultimately I think ended up wasting everyone's time by piling a series of retarded aphorisms on the tradition that now everyone has to write Ph.D. theses about, forever. Yet Wittgenstein is 'the genius,' and for that reason, more of an idiot. — The Great Whatever

I'm curious about your critique of Wittgenstein's main contention that language is the chief cause of philosophical problems. I take it you don't agree with this at all. That most long standing philosophical puzzles exist not because language has fooled us, but because they are genuine puzzles.

What is the error that led Wittgenstein to think this?

One way of thinking about what I'm saying is that your reading of philosophy may be more fruitful if you do not approach a text with the presupposition that its author is a genius, as we're generally taught. — The Great Whatever

Do you think any philosophers you've read are geniuses, or at least, good at philosophy?

How could we know that essentialism or real universal "are the case", for a start. I'm not sure what that could even mean. — John

I don't have a good answer for this right now. Maybe because I'm bad at philosophy. All of this seems to be elaboration on Man being the measure. Which definitely has it's selling points. But there are three things that always bothered me about it:

1. We might not be alone in the universe.

2. The world is much bigger and older than we are.

3. It sounds like the reverse of the Copernican revolution, which removed us from center of the universe. Everything in science has dethroned humans as being central to creation, and yet many philosophers would put us back at the center when it comes to knowledge.

From this it certainly does not follow that substance is material; it has infinite attributes, remember. For the same reasons it obviously does not follow that substance is mental, either. — John

Spinoza defended a form of neutral monism? Interesting.

I don't see how essentialism or real universals being the case would enable us to match our experience directly with anything beyond it. — John

Well, I suppose this all goes back to Plato and his realization that you need the forms for knowledge to make sense of the flux of the world. Empiricism focused on the flux, while Kant recast the forms as categories of thought.

It would seem that both trap us in a world of human perceptions and thoughts. And yet the world continues to surprise us.

So is reading Kant like reading the Bible, where the cultural context is often lost on the modern reader?

What the hell are we good at? — Bitter Crank

Telling stories. Maybe we should put philosophy into literary form. Or just have undergrads watch The Matrix and Fight Club.

Do we need something other as a comparison to notice whether we're poor at an activity?

Here's the suggested evidence that humans perform poorly at philosophy:

1. Errors in reasoning affecting even professional philosophers.

2. Failure to resolve issues explored by the ancient Greeks.

3. Failure to reach consensus on almost anything.

4. That professional philosophers generally agree with the assessment that their colleagues are poor at doing philosophy.

The evidence can be contested, but if it is correct, then we'd have reason for thinking humans aren't that great at philosophizing.

That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.

I heard hims say that in a talk on consciousness with Chalmers and Dennett. Dennett did not agree.

It's an interesting metaphor, but the problem I have with it is how we learned that pretty much of all of reality is stuff we don't need to know.

His argument is that despite only having the desktop appearance available to us when using computers, we've still managed to figure out quite a bit of the internal workings such that we know the desktop is an illusion. Evolution itself is a good example of figuring stuff out.

Dennett's counter argument was basically that animals need to be able to know enough truth to be fit, such was who's a mate, what food is, and what will kill it, otherwise evolution wouldn't work.

If the argument is that mates, food and things that kill are just metaphors, then one wonders what evolution is selecting on.

But that becomes hard to see if consciousness is being understood as a spatialised thing that exists at a location, like stuck inside the head looking out through the windows of the eyes to the world beyond. — apokrisis

It would seem that our sight dominated hominid brains have been fooled by a metaphorical way of thinking about our relationship to the world.

And that fits with the natural logic of the psychological process. To be aware of the realities of the present, we must be informed by the expectations of our past. And keeping it all "internal", it is our failures of prediction which constitute our signs of what "really just happened". We know we were surprised and so by logical implication (rather than direct knowledge) it is right to suppose that there is the noumenal out there as the apophatic source of our uncertainty. — apokrisis

You're saying that surprise is justification for belief in the world beyond us. If we were never surprised by anything, never wrong about how we think or perceive, then there would be no reason to suppose there is more to the world than what we think about it.

They illustrate the way the mind 'builds' the world and assimilates novel information into it. — Wayfarer

Which means a naive view of perception or realism doesn't work. But it's also a mistake to conclude that just because our minds work that way, the world is that way. For example, some have concluded from a meditative or drug induced state that all is one, because of their experience. But another explanation is that the mediation or drugs created the experience, and it has no meaning beyond showing that the mind is capable of collapsing self-other distinctions.

f there is a God, and if He has a view, then it would seem that it must consist in the sum total of the views of all His creatures. — John

This sounds close to Berkeley's idealism. What I gather from your interpretation of Kant is that the following philosophical positions are wrong: Materialism, essentialism and realism qua universals.

If essentialism or real universals were the case, then we would have a way of matching our conceptions with the way the world is. If materialism were the case, then there would be a way to world was, independent of how we or any creature thinks about it or perceives it.

Anything that does reliably appear is considered to be real. — John

Is the stick bent in the water, or does it just appear bent, or are we imagining it to be bent? Did I hallucinate the person in the window, or just imagine seeing a face there?

Is it hot in here is it just me?

Our thinking is a kind of flowering of the world, it is in in that sense in total harmony with the world, like all expressions of nature. Really, when you think about it; how could it be otherwise? — John

Because humans noticed a long time ago a discrepancy between appearance and reality, and that people are quite capable of being wrong about a number of things. Simon Blackburn called this the loose fit between mind and world, and the reason that philosophy came into existence.

Dennett has said that although some animals appear to notice the difference and appear troubled by it, they are not able to reflect on it.

But would it also be abstracted from space. time, mass, shape, number, relation and so on? — John

The reason the view from nowhere is not abstracted from those things is because they're not subject to perceptual relativity or creature dependance, far as we can tell. They have an objective quality to them.

Thus, some people are hopeful that communication with aliens is possible, should we ever make contact, because they will have come to realize the same objective features of the world. In Sagan's Contact book (and the movie based on it), the detection of an alien signal is based on the prime number sequence from 2 to 101. And the main character expresses the view that math is the universal language.

he best we can do is to say things like, for example, that if we had been around at the time of the dinosaurs, and if we are right in thinking that they existed at that time, then we would have seen them. — John

Which would mean it's possible the world is as we think it is, at least in some cases, such as dinosaurs living 65 plus million years ago, we just can't get outside being human to know.

So then the Greek skeptics were right about our knowledge claims.

So Gods' view is from nowhere in particular, but not from nowhere, per se. — John

Right, I think Nagel's argument was that "nowhere" meant a view abstracted from human perception of colors, sounds, smells, etc.

That makes sense to me; and I agree with the point about Kant. The upshot then would seem to be that there is nothing but reality as interpreted; which would seem to be synonymous with reality as conceptual schema, or Wittgenstein's 'world as the totality of facts'. — John

But then what are we to make sense of the world without us, since the totality of facts shows us that we've only been around a short time, and only exist on little speck of dust.

Is the world really on as humans conceive it? Or is it that the world has to be as we fundamentally conceive it (time, space, quantity, etc)?

Or is it that there is no world without us, which runs counter to totality of facts we've accumulated.

I don't understand this position by Davidson, Kant or Witty. Are we back to Protagoras? Man is the measure of all that is and all that could be? Yeah, humans!

Some concepts do seem to be fundamental; space, time, causality, materiality, form, function, quantity, quality, relation, modality. I just thought of those off the top of my head; I'm sure there are more. Do you think we can do without any of those? — John

Perhaps not. But we can revise our thinking on them. And we can propose concepts without one or more of those categories you listed.

The idea that time and space arise from something more fundamental, or that the cosmos is massively contingent and without any prescriptive laws of nature. Or that time doesn't really flow, and the future already exists. Stuff like that.

Did Kant think those things couldn't exist in the world? Was carving nature at its joints incoherent to him?

It seems to me it is in thinking that Kant is concerned with pointlessly debunking the idea of "viewpointless" knowledge that you are misunderstanding what he is about. If he is "shadowboxing" with anything, it is what he refers to as the "transcendental illusion", which is the idea that there is an actuality that exists "out there" like an all-encompassing 'image' that mirrors every possible viewpoint, that somehow "looks like" the world we see. Of course we must think there is a viewpointless actuality, but we cannot really imagine what it is like, because all imagining is from some viewpoint. Kant points out that noumenal actuality cannot be "like anything", because it is viewpointless, and everything we know is viewpointful. — John

So Kant was saying that the God's eye view, or Nagel's view from nowhere can't be had by us, because we have to conceive of the world someway, and that someway cannot mirror the world as it is, because the world is not from any sort of conception or view.

Thus, the noumena.

Without that it's only human, it's only us complexly ooting at each other about homo sapien stuff, and that's it. — Wosret

So Humeans are howler monkeys, and Kant is the monolith from 2001? j/k

so we both can get outside of them, and he isn't trying to justify some cultural prejudices, but secure the objectivity and universality of thought itself. — Wosret

What does it mean for thought to be objective and universal? Does that just mean for all humanity? Or any thinking being? I take it Kant wasn't endorsing Platonism.