We deny that truth is a property. — Pie

We being?

Then why say "both"? — bongo fury

I meant that if propositions are sentences, then truth is a property of propositions, and hence a property of certain sentences.

I dispute the point that propositions are nonlinguistic and timeless entities. To my mind, they are just a certain type of sentences.

Non-linguistic? Abstract? Timeless? — bongo fury

Meh... Why would propositions be timeless? By definition, someone needs to actually propose a proposition and one can't do that outside of time.

And if a proposition is non-linguistic, what does it say?

Seems that Isaac see's a lot of difference. — ssu

Let him tell us what those differences are.

"Is truth a property of sentences (which are linguistic entities in some language or other), or is truth a property of propositions (nonlinguistic, abstract and timeless entities)? — Pie

Both, because propositions are in fact a class of sentences.

Because then, the enemy was exceptionally bad. But otherwise, seems it hasn't been. :snicker: — ssu

Personally, I don't see much of a difference between MM. Putin and Hitler, prior to the Holocaust, or between the UK in the 40's and Ukraine now, for that matter...

Sure. I also recommend you get out of your basement for once in your life, and visit a real war zone. Only then might you be able -- with any luck and a divine intervention or two -- to understand the crassness of a comment belittling other people's suffering from the safety of one's crapper.

You can't compare apples and oranges. I won't make it simpler than that for you.

So why count only direct bombing casualties vastly undercounted on one hand, and all possible estimated indirect "excess deaths" on the other? If in both cases we are talking of 'harm', it ought to be compared through similar harm metrics.

'Harm' is a much wider concept that 'death'.

The death toll would need to be 30 times higher to refute the argument.... — Isaac

Not true, because you are comparing very different variables. One, the OHCHR data, represents a very partial account of civilians (only) casualties from bombing and other direct war effects, which according to their site might vastly underestimate the real number of directly war-induced civilian casualties.

The WHO data, on the other hand, is an estimate of excess deaths due to avoidable factors such as pollution or poor access to health care in peacetime.

In order to do a proper comparison between the respective lethality of war and peace in Ukraine, you would need to estimate the number of excess deaths due to the war, including through an induced deterioration of the civilians' access to health care and many many other indirect risk factors affected by the war. This number won't even stop rising at the end of the war because the Ukrainian society will take time to recover from the blow.

And this number might well be 30 times higher than the very partial OHCHR body count. You cannot possibly know until you estimate it.

They're from the OHCHR and the WHO. — Isaac

Except the OHCHR warned that their data is not reliable statistic but a count a minima. I explained it to you already but you didn't listen, bent on lying as you tend to be

War involves a lot of death, on top of the deaths already caused by greed and profiteering. — Isaac

According to your fake 'statistics', war involves only a minute increase in casualties, almost negligible.

Other videos broadcast from the beach, a few kilometers away, show holidaymakers flabbergasted by the violence of the explosions and hastily leaving the premises. — Olivier5

‘We Need to Get Out of Here’: Fear Grips Annexed Crimea After Airbase Attack

By Anastasia Tenisheva and James Beardsworth, the Moscow Times
Updated: Aug. 10, 2022



https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/08/10/we-need-to-get-out-of-here-fear-grips-annexed-crimea-after-airbase-attack-a78541

I repeat:

If war is 24 times less deadly than a regular peacetime environment, then it is a minor nuisance.

If war is a minor nuisance, then conscription is barely worth talking about. — Olivier5

On Tuesday, a slew of videos posted on social media provided clues to what happened at the Saky naval aviation base on Crimea's southern coast. Witnesses began filming the events after what is believed to have been an initial explosion. A long column of black smoke rises diagonally into the azure blue sky as two huge near-simultaneous explosions occur at least one hundred meters apart. Two fireballs rise rapidly in a typical mushroom shape. This quasi-concomitance evokes the strikes of missiles fired in salvo.

However, the Saky base is about 210 km from the nearest area under Ukrainian control. Very few weapons in the Ukrainian arsenal allow strikes so far and above all so precise. The Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missile can cover the distance and reach a land target, but kyiv has only a very small number of them, intended in principle to protect the coasts in the Odessa region from a landing. Furthermore, it is a subsonic missile, therefore vulnerable to Russian surface-to-air defenses.

What is obvious is the extent of the material damage. Many civilian buildings were badly damaged and dozens of cars parked several hundred meters from the airfield were burnt out. A brief video, filmed inside the airfield, shows an almost unrecognizable Su-24 fighter jet with its wings missing. In a satellite image taken a few hours before the explosions, thirty-seven fighter planes and six helicopters were visible on the tarmac.

Other videos broadcast from the beach, a few kilometers away, show holidaymakers flabbergasted by the violence of the explosions and hastily leaving the premises.

The incident would have caused the departure of very many summer visitors, until a long traffic jam was formed at the level of the Crimean bridge, in the direction of returns to Russia.

" It's only a beginning "

The Russian authorities immediately sought to minimize the scope of the event, speaking of "spontaneous detonation of ammunition" , and dismissing the hypothesis of a successful Ukrainian attack. “No trace of a Ukrainian missile has been found ,” repeat the officials. The death toll from the explosions was one dead and fifteen injured, according to the local health ministry. "It is reminiscent of the sinking of the cruiser Moskva , " said Russian political scientist Andrei Kolesnikov.Ukraine should by no means be shown as effective in the Russian narrative. Only the Russian military is capable of carrying out surgical strikes. Russian tourists must continue to believe that Crimea is untouchable and that Russian soldiers are infallible. The Moskva , flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, sank on April 14 after being hit by two Ukrainian Neptune missiles, but Moscow has always maintained its version that an accidental fire was the cause of the sinking.

(Le Monde)

You are confused, as always. If war is 24 times less deadly than a regular peacetime environment, then it is a minor nuisance.

If war is a minor nuisance, then conscription is barely worth talking about.

The Russian offensive is less harmful than the Holocaust, so what's your problem with it? — Isaac

Well, if we follow your reasoning, the Russians are in fact helping the Ukrainians survive longer by drawing them into a war, thus avoiding far worse dangers such as their neighbours or air pollution.... :chin:

If war is safer than peace, what's your problem with conscription ?

Over 30 times higher? — Isaac

Why not? Also, do add the maimed, the traumatized, the tortured, the raped, and then those suffering from hunger, poverty, or forced migration.

People who have never seen a war speak of it easily, I guess. As I said, you're welcome to enlist in the Ukraine foreign legion, if your neighbours in Sussex are killing you.

From your link:

OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration.

For those who think war is much better than capitalism, air pollution or one's neighbours, I recommend a little vacation in Dombass.

You can do the paperwork here:
https://fightforua.org/

Im not justifying norms. Im asking what moral or normative terms mean on a realist construal. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

What or who would a "realist construal" be?

you'll probably suffer more harm from capitalists and mean neighbors in peace time than you'd do in a war from an invading force. — baker

Crassest post of the day.

Dawkins, Dennett, and Darwin — Pie

I studied biology in some depth at university. It's very rich, and one of the fastest developing sciences, which may explain the limited interest of 20th century philosophers. Their intellectual formation was dominated by general relativity and QM, huge breakthroughs in physics dating from the early 20th century. The rise of biochemistry starts sometimes around Watson and Crick discovery of the DNA structure, ie mid century, and picks up steam in the 60's. Too late for Popper to notice.

For a layman, I recommend François Jacob and Stephen Jay Gould. Both were top notch scientists with an interest in the big picture, humility vis-à-vis the complexity at hand, open-mindedness or absence of heavy ideological bias, and luminous prose.

Personally, I don't have much time for the kind of reductionist thinking, the forcing of square pegs into round holes that I see as characteristic of the 'new atheists'. Things are far more complex than the Selfish Gene.

The Devil.

Biosemiotics is fascinating, though I haven't got around to studying it seriously. — Pie

Indeed, although I see biosemiotics as only one fashionable province in a vast country. I find embryology amazing, for instance. It's about life emergence.

Embryonic development of the human face
— Olivier5

Does Northern Ireland have a right to autonomy? — Isaac

I would think they have a right to be reunited with the rest of Ireland. NI is an anachronistic remnant of colonialism.

To say that those within them are morally obliged to risk their lives to protect the line drawn by some autocrats hundreds of years ago is crazy. — Isaac

@ssu is not arguing for a moral obligation.

How can we put norms and electrons in the same causal nexus, convincingly ? Heal the rift? Just as the German Romantics like Hegel wanted to do... — Pie

Good question.

My take is that there is an obvious middle ground between electrons and norms (or ideas), which is life. Only certain types of life forms have ideas, I think... So the answer may lie in the study of biology and in a philosophy of biological life, its origin and evolution.

Biology is very much underrated among philosophers. Yet they could learn so much from it. Even the great Popper, for instance, ignored biology to a rather odd degree. His three-worlds ontology makes no mention of life, lumped in the same 'world' as unanimated matter. But these are literally worlds apart. Life is already a form of language; it uses codes such as the genetic code and hormones. Life stands halfway between electrons and ideas.

Doubting the real world is just escapism. It's like dreaming that your parents adopted you, and your real parents are in fact Tigger and Winnie the Poo.

This ghost knows what it means to say, even if the words are hard to find, because meaning, like sensation, is pure , immaterial, ghost stuff. The 'ghost' or 'soul' is 'behind' or hidden in the body in some strange way, perhaps in the pineal gland...just as meaningstuff is 'behind' or hidden in the words that carry it. — Pie

I must make a semantic objection here: it seems to me that the use of words like "ghost", "magic" or "hidden" are unhelpful, due to their bagage. They carry a sense of bizarrerie. Even the word "machine" is IMO inaccurate to describe a living organism. To call our body a machine is evidently an ideological imposition, an idea forced onto a thing.

The default, natural state of thinking about the world, adopted by countless primitive societies across the globe and in history, is some kind of animism where the universe and various elements in it have souls. That would be, for us human beings, the 'normal state of affairs', the regular, non-spooky, banal idea that there are souls everywhere.

If you have kids, you may know that when they hurt themselves against some furniture, eg a bed, a good way to assuage their sorrow and stop them crying is to 'punish' the furniture: you hit the bed with your hand saying "take that, baaad bed who hit poor Charlie". And then little Charlie stops crying because some justice was served to the mean bed.

It is the ripping off of this natural view that is truly alien to us and thus strange: an unanimated, dead world, without any meaning, where beds don't have any intention whatsoever, is not our natural way of thinking of it.

I think there are good people and bad people, and all the shades in between where most of us belong. I know it comes across as naïve but I believe we all know that, deep down. Evil does exist, as a force in us humans, and sometime it overtakes some people and cultures. How else can one explain the 20th century (let alone the others)?

Even if one does not want to 'reify' or 'essentialize' evilness and goodness (a concern I feel sympathy for), it still seems to me that some folks tend to behave more generously and kindly than others, or more selfishly and rudely than others, on average.

Yes, that's the most that people of good will can do.

Kindly develop, if you will.

So creating an efficient and functioning democracy as an end result was a real challenge for humanity. (And many would say we haven't yet perfected it yet.) — ssu

Yes. Though I think it may be worse than that in a way. We haven't perfected democracy yet, that is true, but 1) I believe it would be impossible to do since perfection is not mixable with politics; 2) there is a dynamic aspect to it, in that as pro-democratic forces try and perfect democracy, the enemies and parasites of democracy keep finding new ways to undermine it. New threats appear regularly, as in a darwinian system were parasites and hosts are co-evolving.

I'm afraid there will be no end to it, no time, however distant in the future, when we can rest and say: "now we have perfected our democracy."

I like Sellars and Popper for trying to figure out how to talk about the world without having to talk about anything mystical or hidden like sensation or experience. These concepts are fine for everyday use, but they've led philosophers to strange, questionable positions. — Pie

I like Popper a lot. He speaks freely of ideas, sensations or freedom as real things. He even developed the three worlds ontology to affirm the objective reality of human culture and knowledge. I know less about Sellars but he too seems to consider the world of the mind as non-spooky. When you think about it, ideas and sensations are the most familiar thing to us.

'the world is all that is case.' — Pie

I'm fine with that, because it does not imply an observer. Presumably, there was once a world -- like soon after the big bang -- without any claim being made about it by any claimant. Without any representation of itself.

We then perhaps you can spare us your asinine commentary on this subject you've clearly no real opinion on. — Isaac

I love you too, Isaac.

Do ask your questions to Putin, whenever you have a chance. "Why do you asshole Russians have conscription?" And, for good measure: "Why do you asinine cretins illegally send conscripts to wage war onto a foreign country?"

Unless Putin is somebody you can't question?

Who was it you thought was making the argument that conscription was not possible? — Isaac

I think the point is not that conscription is possible. As even you managed to realize, this is agreed by all, and therefore not debated at all.

In my mind, the important point is that a democracy can use this tool more effectively than a dictatorship. Dictatorships have their own advantages of course, and they use them. Hence conscription features among the tools that may be necessary to defend democracy, even though the policy may appear undemocratic superficially.

To gain the public good of "not becoming Malorus" the public have to submit to the public bad of long drawn out war. Why does gaining the former outweigh avoiding the latter? — Isaac

I wouldn't know. Maybe you could ask the question to an Ukrainian, or to a Russian? It's their policy, not mine.

What does the map represent ? — Pie

It usually represents a certain part of the world, at a certain scale / level of detail, and focusing on certain particular features.

As an aside, a map cannot represent everything that might potentially be representable. The map maker must make choices about what features are the most important to depict, based on the map's intended use.

Eg a geologic map of New Hampshire will differ quite a lot from a road map of New Hampshire. Of course both maps are about the same territory and thus they could be superposed / combined into one, if only in the mind of a person looking at both maps, and thus one may argue that we could arrive progressively at a richer and richer map of New Hampshire by adding more and more layers (topography, land cover, etc.) But the point is that no map can exhaust reality. This is another aspect of the map / territory metaphor: any territory will always be vastly richer in information than any map of it. (including New Hampshire)

Our human maps are gross simplifications of their territory, always. That's why they are useful to us, feeble humans. There is such a thing as "too much information".

Let me repeat my theory. The world is something like the set of true claims. If we try to jam the map metaphor into this new context, we might say that the 'map' is our set of warranted but defeasible claims. But we can also just drop the representation metaphor (maps, lenses, mirrors). — Pie

A claim is a representation. It's akin to a map or some stuff drawn on a map. So I think you are right to see maps as sets of warranted claims. But it also follows that "the set of all true claims" is also a representation, a "map". It would be the map of an omniscient, supernatural entity.

But the world is still not a map; not even the map of an omniscient entity. The world is not a representation of something else. It is not a show, nor a claim. The world is the real thing, the ground of being. It is.

At most, when you pay attention, it is present.

'Present' <> 'represented'.