• Feature requests
    One more vote against a word-like editor, which they wouldn't do anyway.
  • In defence of weak naturalism
    This is not the causal relationship between the hammer and the nail. — Samuel Lacrampe

    I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about causation, but it seemed most natural to me to describe it as a relation that held between events rather than objects, so there you have me trying to describe a property of an event, which, as I said, is awkward, for me at least.

    I still think it makes sense though.
  • Ontology of a universe
    ↪noAxioms

    So, you've been at this for over week, how's it going?

    There are some things you could try if you get stuck:

    • Linguistic ascent: instead of looking at the thing you're interested in, look at how we talk about it.
    • Go transcendental: instead of asking, "Is such-and-such the case?" ask what would have to be the case for such-and-such to be the case?
    • Theory-crafting: instead of trying to provide an account of something, ask what a theory that could provide such an account would be like, or would have to be like.

    Sometimes it will turn out you can answer some question from this list, and you'll learn something important--maybe a new approach, maybe that your original problem cannot possibly be answered, etc.
  • Ontology of a universe
    ↪noAxioms

    I was just pestering @Owen for no particular reason.
  • Ontology of a universe
    ↪Owen

    I'm still not sure what you're up to here. It's starting to look like you're deriving existential generalization in a roundabout way. You don't need to.



    is already a rule of FOL.
  • Ontology of a universe
    Kind of followed by my understanding of the last line of Owen's post. So perhaps I misunderstood. I'm trying to get a clarification. — noAxioms

    I think you followed him okay, but it's not yet clear what he's up to.

    Maybe the four-leggedness is not true of unicorns because they would first need to exist to have the four legs, but then the reasoning is circular and meaningless. — noAxioms

    Yeah, that's a distinct possibility.
  • Ontology of a universe
    ↪Owen
    ↪noAxioms

    Somehow I missed that you're doing this the other way round. You have the quantifiers ranging over the predicates. Is this deliberately second-order logic or are you just doing it backwards? (Quantifiers can't range over predicates in FOL.)

    Where you getting the individuals in this scheme? If you can predicate anything of Descartes, you've already assumed Descartes exists.

    If you can prove unicorns exist by saying they have four legs, you know you've done something wrong.
  • Ontology of a universe
    If you're wondering what other way there is to take quantifiers, I think--and I'm no expert--the principal alternative is to take quantifiers as "subsitutional."

    Construed substitutionally, says "' is ' is sometimes true, depending on what you substitute for " and says "' is ' is always true, no matter what you substitute for ." Quantifiers, on this view, range over expressions, not objects. (Again, no expert.)
  • Ontology of a universe
    It's Quine. He takes the existential quantifier as really talking about existence, in the "ordinary" sense.

    So if your system needs a formula such as then your ontology is committed, as he puts it, to the existence of whatever goes in the place.
  • In defence of weak naturalism
    If A caused B, whatever that amounts to and whatever you take as A and B, then B has the property of "being caused by A," but A doesn't. — Srap Tasmaner

    Almost forgot--as soon as I wrote that, it occurred to me that anything qualifying as a "greater cause" in the defined sense, would have to be self-caused. Coincidence?
  • In defence of weak naturalism
    Now if 'all that can exist' is 'anything that we can conceive', and 'anything that we can conceive' is 'anything that must exist', then 'all that can exist' is 'anything that must exist'. (wow that was hard). — Samuel Lacrampe

    You're on the verge of reinventing S5.

    There is a lot of prior art here, and a lot of disagreement, even controversy, among philosophers on the interpretation of modal logics.
  • In defence of weak naturalism
    That's okay if you have not heard of God being defined in that way before. You just need to 'buy' into the definition for us to have a meaningful argument; because we cannot argue if we are not on a common ground when it comes to the terms used. We could technically replace the word 'God', with the word 'X', and this would not change the validity of the syllogism, as long as we agree on the meaning of the terms. — Samuel Lacrampe

    Cool. I'm glad you see the distinction. What's important is (a) not to assume that what carries the authority of common usage is true, and (b) not to assume every definition, however clear, has some object answering to it.
  • In defence of weak naturalism
    You could use this as a definition, something like:

    We define a "greater cause" to be a cause which possesses all the properties that its correlated effects possess.     — Srap Tasmaner

    Just nitpicking: Your definition makes the cause 'equal', not necessarily 'greater'. — Samuel Lacrampe

    That would be true if I said "all and only," which I didn't.

    On the other hand, you could be making the following claim:

    No effect has a property not possessed by its cause.

    This is patently false, as a moment's reflection would show.     — Srap Tasmaner

    Can you show me why? — Samuel Lacrampe

    If A caused B, whatever that amounts to and whatever you take as A and B, then B has the property of "being caused by A," but A doesn't.

    If that seems too clever, here's another: striking the nail with a hammer causes the nail to enter the board. The nail entering the board has the property of wood being displaced by steel; the hammer striking the nail does not. (That's awkward, but I don't really know how to talk about cause and effect perspicuously.)

    [As an aside: I did some googling, and it looks like a lot of your ideas come from apologetics. I just want to commend you for coming here to test them out among people with different backgrounds and commitments.]
  • In defence of weak naturalism
    'Greater' here means that the effect cannot possess a property that was not present in its cause(s). — Samuel Lacrampe

    You could use this as a definition, something like:

      We define a "greater cause" to be a cause which possesses all the properties that its correlated effects possess.

    I'm not sure what use this is, but okay.

    On the other hand, you could be making the following claim:

      No effect has a property not possessed by its cause.

    This is patently false, as a moment's reflection would show.
  • In defence of weak naturalism
    I don't see how you can say that when you talk about something that you're referring to visual imagery, or a sound, or a feeling, etc. but when it comes to obligations, you aren't? An obligation is one of those things that are composed of many different concepts and sensory impressions - like the feeling you get when you don't uphold your obligations, or the feeling you have when you do, or what that obligation is composed of, like going to work, your co-workers who depend on you, your clients who you've built a nice relationship with, etc. - all of which are composed of visual imagery, etc. — Harry Hindu

    This is my starting point:

    • Words (like anything else) have associations for you based on your life history and can be quite complex. Some of these associations can be described--i.e., put into words--but some can't, some you're not even (quite) conscious of, and it is inconceivable that you could share the entirety of your associations with someone else. They are in an obvious way private, taken as a whole, even though they may be similar to another's associations because we are broadly similar to each other living broadly similar lives.
    • Words have meanings as sentence-parts. These are public, and shared. It is because "red" means what it does in English that your mother taught you to say "red" in the presence of red things rather than something else.
    • In between there are connotations, which are shadings of meaning based usually in the history of a word's use within a language community. The use of a particular word in particular sorts of sentences can itself be a source of associations for people, but these associations are inherently public. (Any given member of a language community may or may not be aware of the connotations, depending on whether they are familiar with the history of the word's use, but that history is public.) Racial epithets are the obvious examples.
    • Words can be used to refer to objects, taken broadly, and not excluding words themselves. (It is not clear to me that a word or name "has a reference" in the way it "has a meaning"; whether a word is being used to refer seems dependent on its use in an assertion/question/command/etc.)

    The "meaning" and "reference" bits there are the least fleshed out because they're the interesting (i.e., hard) bits. What's certain, though, is that the meaning of a word is not whatever associations you have with that word.

    Thinking and imagining are composed of sensory impressions. I'm arguing that you cannot think without your thoughts taking some form. Words are simply other visuals and sounds that we associate with other things. We even associate other things that aren't words with other things, like the taste of a cookie with the visual of a cookie, or maybe even your mother who makes the best cookies - associations that one can establish without even knowing a language. — Harry Hindu

    I will not pretend to know how thinking, taken broadly, works, or how language use and thinking go together. Just as, above, we were drifting into linguistics, here we drift into psychology. I'll make just a few "points" that seem to apply to much of our thinking and language processing:

    • It is incredibly fast. The vast majority of your language production and consumption happens without any pausing to reflect, puzzling out, deducing, etc. Mostly it just works, and works so far as you're concerned instantly.
    • Much of it is involuntary. You do not "decide" whether to understand words you hear in a language you know, you just do. You often do not "decide" which words to use when you speak--the intent to communicate something leads directly to the right words without conscious effort.
    • And those two points lead directly to the third, which is that a whole lot of language processing (and thinking) is unconscious, quite likely carried out by specialized structures in your brain.

    We tend to be aware of the exceptions, trying to find words to express a thought, puzzling out what someone means, etc. With thinking as well, the exceptions, where the incessant flow is interrupted, seem to be where conscious rationality finds room to work.

    But that also means that the sort of empiricist view you express here is missing a whole lot of data. I love Hume too, but linguistics and psychology have moved on.
  • In defence of weak naturalism
    Yes, I believe I experienced my mother before I learned the word "mother." (I don't know why you would think I had claimed otherwise, but no biggie.) — Srap Tasmaner

    Of course it's a biggie because it shows that your words refer to other things, and that is what you mean when you say them. I should just drop the microphone here, but I'll indulge you a bit more. — Harry Hindu

    You seem to be under the impression that I denied words can be used to refer. As I said before, I don't know how you got that impression, but I hold no such view, and do not believe I have expressed such a view here.

    (If you could point out to me what I said that gave you that impression, I would be grateful; perhaps I expressed myself poorly. It happens.)

    So, prior to typing something on the screen, you don't have an idea composed of a visual of how things actually are, and then use that idea to come up with words to communicate that idea? Are you seriously saying that the only thing that comes to your mind is words that get typed out on a screen? — Harry Hindu

    I'm not aware of having "an idea composed of a visual of how things actually are" before I speak, or write, except when I'm trying to describe something I'm imagining visually. — Srap Tasmaner

    Then what are you talking about when you say or write anything about some state-of-affairs that exists? — Harry Hindu

    I simply do not understand how these are connected. If I talk about something I am visually imagining, that's what I'm talking about. If I talk about something I'm looking at, I'm not talking about something I'm imagining. I can talk about having an obligation, even though I don't know how to visualize an obligation. I talk about music all the time without ever visualizing it.

    I just really have no idea why you would think I have to visualize something in order to talk about it. Maybe I've misunderstood you.

    What about what I said about translating words from different languages. What are we translating if not the meaning of the words? — Harry Hindu

    If you're suggesting that I think words don't have meanings, I'm once again at a loss, as I don't think I've said anything to suggest I think that.

    We use the words we do to form novel assertions (questions, commands, etc.) because of the meanings those words have. — Srap Tasmaner
  • In defence of weak naturalism
    Wait a second, are you even reading my posts? — Harry Hindu

    Yes, of course. It wasn't clear to me what you were saying, so I wanted to focus on one thing at a time, make sure we're talking about the same thing, and then it would be clearer where we agreed and where we disagreed.

    Are you agreeing at all with what I said about your mother,

    Yes, I believe I experienced my mother before I learned the word "mother." (I don't know why you would think I had claimed otherwise, but no biggie.)

    about typing words on screen,

    Here I disagree. I'm not aware of having "an idea composed of a visual of how things actually are" before I speak, or write, except when I'm trying to describe something I'm imagining visually.

    and all those other questions I asked?

    I honestly thought some of them were rhetorical, and I'm still not sure which is which.

    Do you think that you are the only one that can ask questions and receive answers? If you expect me to answer questions, you need to do the same.

    Fair enough, and in that spirit I have directly answered the questions you mentioned, and I will answer each of the questions in the last paragraph:

    What made you say, "I have to be at work by 2:30 today."?

    We don't know. There are quite a few possible scenarios. For the record, I would take "what made me say it" as something different from "what I meant by it," which is in turn different from "what the sentence means."

    Why are you saying it?

    Also don't know, and now we can add "why I said it" to that list. These things are all different to me.

    Isn't it because there is a state-of-affairs that needs to happen in the future?

    Maybe? That's an odd way to put it. It's also possible that I was lying when I spoke, which would change "why I said it" but not "what it means."

    Isn't it a prediction that you are referring to?

    I really hadn't thought of that one. It doesn't sound like a prediction to me. I would have assumed most English speakers would hear "I have to be at work by 2:30 today" as expressing an obligation. (For comparison: "I will be at work today by 2:30" I would hear as a prediction, or more likely an expectation.)

    [As an aside, and I sincerely hope you don't take offense here, but may I ask if English is your native language? I only ask because I might mistakenly rely on our hearing things the same way, and if we don't there could be needless misunderstanding.]

    After all, there could be an accident on the way to work and you could be late. How is it that you could be wrong about being at work by 2:30 that doesn't have to do with how you used your words?

    I really don't hear that sentence as a prediction, but if it were then of course it would be vulnerable to going wrong in the usual ways, as you suggest, which don't have to do with how I use words.

    So I've answered your questions as best I could. I hope it helps.
  • Identity
    [Retracted: @darthbarracuda correctly spotted a risk that his thread would be hijacked. (Sorry, man.)]
  • In defence of weak naturalism
    ↪Harry Hindu


    Let's look at a specific example.

    Suppose I tell you, "I have to be at work by 2:30 today."

    Maybe as I say this, there are various images in my mind--flashes of my workplace, the people there, driving, getting ready for work, saying goodbye to the kids. Maybe all of these and a lot more, maybe only some, maybe interspersed with other images and thoughts--I am conscious at the moment and also thinking about other things, taking in my surroundings and so on.

    I want to say, just to start with, that none of this stuff going on in my head is the meaning of the sentence "I have to be at work by 2:30 today." I want to distinguish all that stuff from, as you put it, the idea I intend to communicate to you.

    Can we agree on that much?
  • What is a dream?
    ↪woodart
    I guess we part company here then. Best of luck to you.
  • What is a dream?
    ↪Bitter Crank

    It's almost like in the absence of sensory input or (what usually passes for) conscious thought, you end up eavesdropping on (other parts/systems of) the brain going about its business, and you don't understand what the hell you're listening to.

    (Just speculative chit-chat.)
  • In defence of weak naturalism
    Premise 1: God is traditionally defined as 'that which nothing greater can be conceived'. You can look it up; I did not come up with the definition.
    Premise 2: No effect can be greater than its cause(s). This is a principal in causality. If you object, you would need to find an exception to this principal.     — Samuel Lacrampe

    Premise 1 is a claim about language use among I don't know what community of speakers, which doesn't seem like it would suit what seems to be a metaphysical argument. There's also something there about this community's imaginative capacity, and I don't know what to do with that that either. I don't know how to verify any of those claims, or what I would have if I did. Even if Premise 1 is true in some specified sense, what good is it?

    I don't have the faintest idea what Premise 2 means. I guess that's on me. What does "greater" mean here? That would help. I'm not even sure what kind of statement it's supposed to be. Is it a natural law, or some sort of metaphysical law?

    Whatever sort of statement Premise 2 turns out to be, it seems like a different kettle of fish from Premise 1, so I don't see how they're supposed to be linked.
  • What is a dream?
    I do not feel contradiction with apokrisis - I view my dreams differently and told him it was his prerogative to see it his way. There can be more than many truths. I really believe it is entirely subjective. There is no grand formula for interpretation and meaning. The value and purpose we place on dreams is totally subjective. Dreams mean what you think they mean – don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. — woodart

    In a sense, that's saying there's just nothing for philosophy to do here, and that's fine.

    But maybe there is some stuff to get into here. Our non-dream experiences include a bodily component that others can (at least in principle) witness. And our bodies are not so dramatically different from each other that when we talk about those sorts of everyday experiences, we can assume a lot of that experience is similar. Often when someone says, "I know how you feel," that can be literally true.

    Dreams, though, seem to be a unique class of experience. Even though our minds are broadly similar, just as our bodies are, the whole range of physical correlatives is missing. You get mentation naked, so to speak, and that seems like something philosophy, as well as psychology, would want a look at. Only you can't have that. All you get is people's reports.

    Even if dreams were uniquely subjective, how could we know?
  • In defence of weak naturalism
    Where do you see a flaw in the logic? — Samuel Lacrampe

    I guess if I had to pick something, I'd say, "All of the premises and inferences."
  • In defence of weak naturalism
    we deduce — Samuel Lacrampe

    No we don't.
  • What is a dream?
    ↪woodart

    People find meaning and value in all sorts of experiences, whatever their source.

    You don't have to see what @apokrisis said as contradicting your view. Your brain does stuff; you experience that in a certain way. What the brain does has side effects; you experience that too. There may be a "physiological purpose" of some kind to what goes on while you sleep; I think some researchers have also suggested it's the brain finishing processing the day, so that's a more "cognitive purpose," more directly related to your experience. Whatever it's doing can be a real and meaningful experience for you, especially since what it has to work with is mostly your life.

    I do wonder how we could possibly resolve a conflict about the nature and meaning of dreams. Philosophers have had a hard enough time dealing with "intuitions." One place to start might be taking a closer look at what I casually described as "experiencing" your dreams. It's clearly way different from other sorts of experience we have.
  • In defence of weak naturalism
    It is the shared meaning of the word that I learned. — Harry Hindu

    If "the idea in someone's head that triggered the use of the word is what the word means," how can this be shared?

    Maybe you mean something different by "the idea in someone's head" than I think you do. (I think of that as, more or less, "what comes to mind," when you hear a word.)

    By "the idea in someone's head," do you mean an intention of theirs? (The intention to speak, to communicate a thought, to be understood to be attempting to communicate--there are lots of intentions.)
  • In defence of weak naturalism
    The idea in someone's head that triggered the use of the word is what the word means, as the intent to communicate that idea existed prior to the use of the word. The meaning of words has nothing to do with their use. It has everything to do with the intent of the communicator. If "meaning" were use, then the word, "God", wouldn't refer to anything - not even the idea in someone's head. It would only refer to the use. So, god isn't a divine entity, not even an imaginary one? God is simply some use of some scribbles? Does that make sense? — Harry Hindu

    What do you learn when you learn the meaning of a word? Is it the idea that is in your head? Is it the idea that is in someone else's head?
  • Do You Dare to Say the "I" Word?
    I can give you another example of this sort of thing.

    After the Abu Ghraib videos came out, there was controversy, liberals were appalled, but then a Republican senator famously said he was "outraged by the outrage."

    In response to that, Robert Siegel of NPR reminisced about when he was with American troops during the first gulf war. Iraqi soldiers were surrendering as fast they could--looking for Americans to surrender to. Siegel described how the troops he was with would bring the Iraqis blankets and bottled water, even light cigarettes and place them in their mouths. They were so gentle, he said.

    And the point is, Americans want to be believe that this is who we are, that the response to what happened at Abu Ghraib should not be, "So what? They're the bad guys and we're at war!" The response should be, "We're better than this. This is not who we are."

    Similarly, it was inspiring for this guy, in the presence of a terrorist committing a violent act, to resist equating his act with Islam, and to engage him as someone who has beliefs, that you could argue with, that you could call out for being wrong, not just as "the enemy." That's who we're supposed to be.

    ADDED: So some of this is me projecting. His point was only to distinguish between the pure evil of ISIS and Islam. But it's still inspiring that someone could keep that distinction in mind face-to-face with a guy wielding a knife.
  • Do You Dare to Say the "I" Word?
    Here's a story from the Washington Post that includes the original video and the "social media response." (Of course I americanized "bruv" into "bro.")

    What was exciting about it at the time was that it seemed to be a spontaneous recognition by a witness to a terrorist act that what he was seeing was not an expression of religion, and he addressed the terrorist exactly at the level of claims to be acting in the name of Islam.

    I think a lot of us assumed at first that the comment made the most sense coming from a Muslim, but that was not the case.

    It was still powerful, still represented just the response you would hope for in a liberal society--for comparison, it's easy to find video from Trump rallies where people are yelling "Fuck Islam!"--but it lacked that additional sense of "taking back Islam." I think we imagined Muslim communities around the world standing up to extremists, maybe even some of those young, impressionable extremists doing some soul-searching, etc. Alas, the world again failed to change.
  • Do You Dare to Say the "I" Word?
    Remember "You ain't no Muslim, bro"?

    That was powerful. I really thought there was a chance then that the conversation would change.
  • Philosophy is Stupid... How would you respond?
    But, I am in the habit of taking philosophy classes and reading philosophy. — anonymous66

    So you enjoy it.

    What you're running into here is a question of taste. People are often really invested in their tastes. (I think Alain de Botton has a book about this.) To some people, you are what you like. It can be hard to understand how someone can like something you don't. You might even take differing taste as an implied critique of your own taste, of your identity. It gets emotional.

    So you could just say, de gustibus non est disputandum. But if you were thinking you could give them, you know, reasons why philosophy isn't stupid, you've got to recognize that that's you thinking like a philosopher. Any reason might be taken as just more stupidity.

    You enjoy it, and you're not hurting anyone. That's enough reason. (You might even try to find some way to get across to them what you enjoy about philosophy. That would do more than some lecture on What Makes Philosophy Important and Valuable to Humanity.)
  • Philosophy is Stupid... How would you respond?
    How would you respond? — anonymous66

  • TPF Quote Cabinet
    One might almost say that oversimplification is the occupational hazard of a philosophy, if it were not the occupation. — J. L. Austin
  • PSA: This site supports MathJax
    Thanks guys!

    Despite some limitations, should be good enough for our proposes.
  • Ontology of a universe
    It seems I misinterpreted your meaning of U. You define it (tentatively) as everything that exists in the sort of way I am seeking, not as 'our universe' which is just the chunk of spacetime to which I have access and includes "all the stuff I see and can imply from it".
    Taking your definition of U, your statement above is just restating the problem in my OP.     — noAxioms

    Restating your position was the whole point. It wasn't my definition, not even tentatively. I don't think you intended what you said as a definition of "existence," but I wanted to point out that you could use it that way. Or you could use something else. Whatever. Use it and see how well it works.

    (Btw, what you said offhand is really not bad. It amounts, in an informal way, to "science": what I can directly sense plus what my model tells me must exist even though I can't directly sense it, so, you know, atoms and shit.)

    Our universe is presumed to 'exist', and not just by being a member of itself. I'm asking what that means. I'm questioning that it means anything at all.

    Gracious. If you want to figure out what something means, take a stab at defining it and see how it goes. I'm just pointing out that you've kinda already been doing that, but you keep jumping around to other stuff.

    I'm not saying this method is guaranteed to work. (Chisolming is a thing.) But you'll probably learn something.

    Look, offhand, it looks a bit like a classic "category mistake." (Ryle's original example was the guy looking around at the buildings of Oxford and asking, "But where is the University?") But there's no reason for you to even entertain that conclusion yet. Do not look at solutions until you're clear what the problem is.
  • Compositionality & Frege's context principle
    Oddly enough, though, between two people, there often are such words. I go walking with a mate every Tuesday and he gets a text at some point during the day. 'Milk' means, 'Please stop at the store on the way home and get milk.' ' — mcdoodle

    No, that's just ellipsis, and the rest of the sentence is understood from the wider context of the relationship between these people, their housekeeping habits, the rigors of communicating on mobile devices, etc. "Milk" still just means milk. (That whole sentence will never appear in a dictionary as one of the meanings of the word "milk," and for good reason.)

    The word "milk" is also ambiguous, but it's pretty clear that the parties to this exchange have a usual agreed-upon meaning, so the ambiguity is not an issue here for them. You could also think of this as part of the context of their exchange.

    None of this is really the sort of context at stake in Frege's context principle.

    You cannot perform a complete linguistic act with just a word or any bunch of words. (Except, as noted, elliptically.) Sentences are special. So you want to say something like, "the meaning of a word is its use in sentences." (We can get much fancier about formulating the context principle if needed.)

    The trick (besides dealing with the potential circularity) is to avoid denying compositionality. You can end up thinking the sentence, or the wider context of its utterance, "gives" the words in it meaning, which they lacked until they appeared in that sentence (or until its utterance in a particular context, etc.). This is patently false. If it were true, language would be impossible.
  • Ontology of a universe
    Yeah, I don't understand the significance of being a member of some set. If some means any, then anything you can name is a member of any number of sets. If it is some particular set, then the burden of definition is shifted to defining that set. — SophistiCat

    That last bit was where I was headed. Would have been clearer if I had said "a special set, let's call it U." That's what @noAxioms seemed to want to do, and I was just helping him along, as it turns out, mistakenly.
  • Poll: Religious adherence on this forum
    Don't worry, spiders,
    I keep house
    casually.     — Issa, translated by Robert Haas
  • In defence of weak naturalism
    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 — The Great Whatever

    Maybe if you told us what would count as a "substantive ontological sense," then we could understand what you mean by this:

    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. — The Great Whatever

    I'd guess a lot of us might grant that it's a "prejudice," but a prejudice that comes from being physical beings, so we're pretty attached to it. (We're not talking about thinking you won't like Indian food.)
Home » Srap Tasmaner