Point being, I don't see that we've improved on his reasoning in this topic, we don't know what it is that connects our thoughts. — Manuel

I think we have, considerably. The notion of "what connects our thoughts" is problematic itself. It's based upon an understanding that led itself to a question about our thoughts that it could not answer because of the inherently deficient framework underwriting the question itself(because of the fact that Hume worked from a misunderstanding, an inherently emaciated notion of human thought/understanding).

Banno and myself have very similar views, but there are crucial differences. He is more Wittgensteinian than I. Much more actually. However, although I am quite confident that where we disagree I am correct and he's not, I must admit that Banno is remarkably efficient at making his points. I admire his brevity.

We agree that morality is enforced. What next?

:brow:

Can you explain how thought works other than in terms of association, whether logical, metaphorical, magical, poetical, or whatever? — Janus

I've explained my objection above, for the third time. Yes, I can explain how thought works. I would not talk in terms of "thought connections" for all the reasons mentioned heretofore.

Well, in Hume's famous Appendix to his Treatise, he concluded that:

"In short there are two principles, which I cannot render consistent; nor is it in my power to renounce either of them, viz. that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences. Did our perceptions either inhere in something simple and individual, or did the mind perceive some real connexion among them, there wou'd be no difficulty in the case. For my part, I must plead the privilege of a sceptic, and confess, that this difficulty is too hard for my understanding."

He's probably right. — Manuel

Well, as astute as Hume was regarding some things, his notion of thought is found sorely wanting. His understanding worked from the notion of perception commonplace at the time. "Perception", as was used historically, was fraught.

See the problem?
— creativesoul

No. What is the problem?

The issue is random thoughts but according to Ramsey theory, true randomness doesn't exist. — Agent Smith

The 'problem' amounted to conflicting understandings is all. I mean, yours and my own, respectively. We have two very different notions of what counts as thought at work. It's as if we're working from two incompatible definitions of the term "thought". Oh, and apologies are on order here. The problem actually wasn't one with what you wrote, per se. Unless of course, I'm right. You see, I am of the belief that all thought consists entirely of correlations, and since correlations are akin to connections such as they are, when I see another write something like "thought connections", I cringe because, on my view, that would be like saying "correlations connections" or even "connections connections". So, my apologies for failing to spell that out clearly enough in muh first post.

Now, to this 'issue'...

We cannot say what a random thought even is, unless we first know what a thought is, for the former is a kind of the latter, a sort of sub-species, so to speak. So, circling back to the differences of notions or definitions here, I'm curious to know what you mean when you use the term "thought".

I don't know enough about "Ramsey theory" to comment about that aspect of your issue.

If morality is always about what should or should not be done in some particular situation or another, and a society is a group of individuals that have commonly shared values and beliefs, then what makes a society what it is are commonly held/shared moral beliefs (that which is considered to be acceptable/unacceptable behaviour by enough of the members as to maintain stability). Morality, then, amounts to the codified rules of societal behaviour. We could call these laws without issue. So, if an individual breaks the law, it is a crime against the moral/ethical code (one of which presumably most members agree).

I'm still not at all confident in calling all law breaking "crimes against society" for the simple reason that there ought be a distinction drawn between the amount of injury that the crime results in addition to who exactly is injured. For instance, there's quite a bit of difference, one would think, between the harm that jaywalking causes and say the amount of harm that defrauding the American people about the integrity of the 2020 election causes. Placing these two crimes on the same level trivializes the severity of injury that the latter has caused, while elevating the severity of the former by association alone.

So, while I generally agree with what I think your saying, I suspect that there's some much needed refinement so as to avoid painting the picture with too broad a brushstroke. There are also very different kinds of societies where the majority do not have much say in the laws.

Cannot. That is exactly the point. Talking in terms of "thought connections" like the OP chose to do is an inadequate method for better understanding what thought is and how it works.

Perhaps there will be less of a surprise.

The problem is that Trump and his supporters in the House and basically the entire right wing conservative media apparatus have convinced a very large portion of the American population that the election was stolen. That belief is false, yet it is no less a powerful one.



Generally speaking about one deeply embedded problem in American government...

Trump benefitted from the fact that America has the best system money can buy, and he did so from both sides of that corrupt reality. He bought politicians, and publicly bragged about it on national television in front of some of those who he had previously bought, in their presence no less. That happened during the public debate during the primary season of the election

The fact that were no objections to that was astonishing to me at the time.

Plutocracy is not the representative form of government set up by the Constitution. It is closer to what we have than one of officials who represent what's in the best interest of all Americans.

We no longer have a government that places the best interests of the overwhelming majority of Americans at the top of the priority list when making policy decisions. We legalized government bribery in the seventies by changing how it is described, in the guise of characterizing unlimited campaign contributions by very rich individuals as an exercise in an individual's first amendment rights to "free speech". Now there are all sorts of counterarguments that outright reject that argument and do so convincingly, but this is not he place or time. I digress, the SCOTUS set the precedent for legalized bribery to manifest with that decision. Then, president Nixon placed the attorney who argued that case on the court itself. A few years later the court then expanded the ability to bribe elected officials to include a corporation's ability, because corporations are people too. Then, of course, Citizen's United not that long ago...

The current American government is tremendously corrupt, and that is well known and out in the open. That common knowledge is part of what allowed Trump to rise in power amongst all those American citizens who've suffered the results of the aforementioned court cases.

Conflict of interest be damned...

The interests of very large corporations and wealthy donors took and are still currently taking precedent over the overwhelming majority even now. Look at the government response to the pandemic, or look at what has happened to legislation that would have tremendously improved American's lives and livelihoods in all sorts of ways that was completely funded by taxing the richest corporations and Americans(those making over half million per year.)

What I would really like to do is explore the possibility space on the matter of thought connections. Is it that only logical connections between ideas reveal truth/sense/reality? — Agent Smith

What would happen to this endeavor if all thought consisted of connections? We would be exploring the possibility of connections connections...

See the problem?

It seems more and more evident that there certainly was an attempt to stop the peaceful transition of power, and that that effort was coordinated on many levels, all of which were/are based upon false claims about the integrity of the 2020 presidential election. Those claims were the basis of over 60 different court cases, none of which survived the disclosure/evidentiary stage. Claims made. Evidence asked for. None offered. Case dismissed. Some of those attorneys have been found to have broken the ethics of the BAR and have been recommended for being disbarred as a result of knowing that there was insufficient evidence for the charges prior to wasting the courts' time.

Those claims are still being made as a means to manufacture public consent for all sorts of things.

The power of belief has been known by myself for quite some time. The Trump years have put it on display for all to see. For a half century, America has slid away from the importance of truth and truth telling, while having simultaneously exonerated, rewarded, and even glorified blatant deception and the telling of falsehoods...

Trump was not and is not the problem. He is a symptom.

Witt is wrong. The limits of our language do not represent the limits of our world. They most certainly do represent the limits of what we can sensibly talk about.

In response to the OP...

The cloth was not a cow. The farmer believed the cloth was a cow. All Gettier problems are accounting malpractices of an other's belief. Plain and simple. All of them.

As it must be, it is a set of universally applicable principles...

the Japs — Apollodorus

Nice racial slur.

Your opinion does not matter here. It doesn't matter if it does not make sense to you. The 'logic' you've employed here is flawed as well.

Whether or not the Japanese civilians were targeted has nothing to do with your belief or opinion. It has to do with whether or not they were being targeted. If they were the target, they would not have been warned by pamphlet of the day it was going to happen. They were warned more than once of that day. The warning allowed many to flee the area prior to, which tremendously reduced the casualities. Those are facts.

There would have been far far more casualties had the warnings not been dropped. That is not the sort of thing done if civilians were the target, if reducing the number of civilian casualties was not priority, and/or if those civilian deaths were not troubling.

What is the secret to being happy in a foxhole? — baker

Accept the way things are. Know what difference one can make. Be content with what one does and/or has done.

...civilians have always been targeted in wars — Apollodorus

Civilians were not the targets of the nuclear weapons used to end WWII in the Pacific. Stop spouting that bullshit! There were manufacturing facilities crucial to the Japanese war effort in both cities. It is well known that the knowledge of civilian casualties deeply troubled FDR and Truman. In fact, the civilians were forewarned by dropping pamphlets from the sky so as to reduce the numbers of civilian causalties, because the US wanted to reduce the civilian casualities as much as possible. That's not the sort of thing that is done if the civilians are being targeted.

You don't need any justification. Why limit yourself with reason. Transcend reason. Be a force of nature — Wittgenstein

Yeah, who cares whether or not our beliefs are reasonable, rational, and/or true? Be a force of nature.

Geez!

Justification is all about the ground(basis) for the belief in question. Whether or not a belief is justified is determined by the truth/falsity of the ground(other beliefs that support the belief in question), as well as the reasoning method used to arrive at the belief in question. So, it doesn't do the notion of justification any 'justice' to ask "who?".

Perhaps an example would help...

If my lifelong friend has always owned a Ford, and I know that he was about to buy a new car last week because he told me so, and he picked me up in a new Ford this morning so we could go to our tennis courts to play our weekly matches, then I would be justified in believing that the new car he drove this morning was his new car.

So insofar that an entity is able to truthfully have something predicated of it, then we are justified in believing that it exists. And, I imagine we'd agree, that whether we speak about something doesn't influence its existence either, so sure things exist before we give accounts of them. — Moliere

I agree with the first claim(although I'm not sure of the significance of saying something "truthful"), disagree with the claim that speaking doesn't influence(some things') existence, and agree with the last claim... (some)things exist before we give accounts of them.

I suspect our ontologies/taxonomies will differ in a few remarkable ways. Quine's maxim, which you've borrowed here in this account, had an agenda. Namely to target the superfluous nature of the terms "existence" and "exists" and the nature of abstract objects.

Just to make sure we're not delving into exegesis, as I also refused to with 180 Proof , let's just drop the name Quine and say "this account", if that's ok with you. — Moliere

Fine by me.

However, I certainly did not introduce anything like that. To exist is to be the value of a variable -- which is to say that first order predicate logic's existential operator is in use. So insofar that an entity is able to truthfully have something predicated of it, then we are justified in believing that it exists. And, I imagine we'd agree, that whether we speak about something doesn't influence its existence either, so sure things exist before we give accounts of them. I'm just not making a distinction really.

To exist is to be the value of a variable
things exist before we give accounts of them

My issue with Quine's account was posed to you. My issue with the account you're offering is that those two claims directly above are mutually exclusive. If the one is true, the other cannot be, and vice-versa.

The position Nos is attempting to promote is one that exonerates people like Trump and any other promoters of the known falsehoods about 'widespread election fraud' and the idea that the election of 2020 was stolen from Trump.
— creativesoul

It is one thing if NOS4A2 believes speech has no power only because he wants to exonerate Trump; another entirely, if he held this opinion prior to Trump’s promulgation of “widespread election fraud”... — Leghorn

His wants are irrelevant.

Not only does it(systemic racism) exist, but there are many who are currently attempting to stop the public from learning about how it does by virtue of making a concerted effort to discredit one of the means/methods of that teaching(in law schools)... aka Critical Race Theory. The amount of sheer disinformation and misinformation about what it is and where it's taught that is being spoken in conservative media is astounding.

The problem is that the impotence of current conservatism is becoming more and more apparant in the marketplace of political ideas. The American public quite simply does not agree with it and who it ultimately benefits. So, the current effort of conservative media is to manufacture falsehoods about CRT for the expressed purpose of making it unacceptable to Americans. The dishonesty of course is that the means for making it uncceptable is to mislead Americans about it.

The thread seems to have ontology underwriting it. The idea of something 'obtaining as a fact' seems a bit unnecessarily confused to me. If we're looking to effectively exhaust what things like Santa and Pegasus are, then it seems that the simplest way is best. I do not think that introducing "facts" helps here.

Similar to Banno's categorization of Pegasus as "mythical", both Pegasus and Santa are fictional characters. Fictional characters are not best described as 'not real'. Fictional characters have actual effects/affects. Thus, they are most certainly real, just as all things that have an effect/affect are.

I see. That seems relevant to me. So, what other dialogues are relevant to the Euthyphro and how?

Is there no difference between being taken account of and existing prior to that account?

Seems Quine doesn't honor/accept that distinction.

For a proper understanding of the dialogue I think it is essential to take into consideration the author's own views as reflected in other writings... — Apollodorus

Other writing by Plato, or other writings by others interpreting Plato, or writings by others claiming to be based upon Plato?

'Platonists' who use notions like God, Ultimate Reality, or Universal Consciousness are like Plato in namesake only.

1. To the Platonists, God, Ultimate Reality or Universal Consciousness is everything. Philosophy of the monistic idealist type is what explains reality for them. — Apollodorus

Well, I'll have to take your word for what the Platonists believe. It does, from my vantage point, look a bit different from Plato. Regardless, when it pertains to monism, Spinoza's Ethics is the only account thereof that I've been fortunate enough to read that is coherent. However, it too assumes the existence of that which can conceive in and of itself(God). This seems too tangential to the OP though, so I've nothing further unless it can be showed as relevant. Even then, my interest in that is waning quickly, and I'll not want to be a part of distracting dialogue. I don't like it in my threads, so...

The position Nos is attempting to promote is one that exonerates people like Trump and any other promoters of the known falsehoods about 'widespread election fraud' and the idea that the election of 2020 was stolen from Trump.

Yet again, a power of speech.

Thankfully, it seems that enough people know better than to claim that the promotion and manufacture of doubt and mistrust in the election of 2020 had no effects/affects on the followers of Trump and/or the current confidence of Republican voters in the American system. We all know, including Mitch McConnell, as per his own initial condemnation of Trump's central role in the insurrection of Jan. 6, that Trump's free speech had effects/affects that led directly to certain beliefs and behaviours culminating in the attempt to stop the peaceful transition of power.

Ad homs are also something that can be done with the power of speech...

Okay.

:brow:

This doesn't help your case Nos. Now you're just muddying the waters with irrelevant gibberish, false accusations, misinformation, and demonstrably false accounts of our conversation...

...and you're doing all that, once again, with the power of speech.

Saying something is also a power. Moving the goalposts is yet another. You're doing both... with speech.

The question I asked remains however. If God is everything, what sense does it make to talk about whether God invented anything at all? That was the point.

Nah. I'm not as big a fan of Witty as many others are here. In general, I mean, I've read enough of the letters to Cambridge to see the man behind the philosophy. Also knowing that the overwhelming majority of his published writing was gathered, collected, and published posthumously. Certainly not a fan of Plato's 'dialogues'. They seemed more like monologues to me(the ones I've read).

However, given the hstorical context, and what both had to work with at the time, they are both brilliant in their own ways.

I don’t use them as a means of convincing others. I use them as a means of expression, of creativity, to communicate my thoughts and to manifest my thinking. — NOS4A2

Nah, Nos, you're full of shit.

You claim words have no power. Then you use them because they do, in fact, have the power to...

...as a means of expression, of creativity, to communicate my thoughts and to manifest my thinking... — NOS4A2

The ability to express is a power. The ability to communicate is, once again, a power. The ability to manifest thought is, yet again, a power...

There's currently a push in Florida which is basically attempting to survey potential students at universities as a means to acquire knowledge of their political stances/leanings. The claimed reasoning for this is to promote critical thinking and the questioning of assumptions in the guise of increasing diversity and well rounded considerations of ideologies. This push is being performed under the guise of free speech. It all sounds nice until we understand that it's not an attempt to broaden the critical thinking and inclusivity that it claims to be. Rather, it's an attempt to remove the discussions of certain kinds of political and philosophical thought such as communism, marxism, and democratic socialism from being considered with unbiased and/or positive discussion to being labeled as "stale ideologies". It is an attempt to not allow such political stances to be freely discussed on campus, and allowing only(presumably) their counterparts that privilege.

To use the idea of promoting diversity and inclusiveness as a means to suppress discussions and expressions of dissenting and/or oppositional ideas/thoughts in order to promote more conservative(politically speaking) ideas and discussions is disgusting.

Ah. Forgive me for not having read the primary source, or for having forgotten if I have. I've nothing further, for Socrates' answer introducing the just as the whole of piety and impiety seems to unnecessarily multiply entities. Given the historical context and knowledge base of the time, it's understandable.

Be well.

Censorship begins, in part, with the conferring of power to speech. One must fear the effects of speech to seek to regulate it, and to do this one must suppose the speech has enough power to cause effects in the first place.

The problem is conferring power to speech is much like conferring power to kings; the only power they have is what society gives them. — NOS4A2

It's not the 'conferring' of power to speech that is the problem Nos. Speech has power. We all know this. That's why we use it. That's why you're here using it as well. As a means to convince others that speech has no power(if by that I mean the abillity to influence subsequent thought, belief, and behaviour). Your stance here is untenable. If you believed that speech has no power, then you would not be using it as a means to convince others that it has no power.

It is simply untrue that words possess any power over that of man. After all, he is the creator of them. So we should work to dispel that myth, defang speech, remind people of their power over and above that of words and opinions, and free ourselves from our most deep-seeded superstitions. — NOS4A2

It does not follow from the fact that man created something that that something does not have the ability to influence man's thought, belief, and behaviour. Your reasoning here contradicts your actions. I think it's called a performative contradiction...

If you believe that words have no power, then what sense does it make for you to use them as a means for convincing others of that idea?

What Socrates tries to get Euthyphro to see is that piety without regard to goodness and justice leads to impiety. — Fooloso4

Could you offer a succinct explanation of this? I have always understood the problem to be an issue for divine command theory(that what counts as pious, just, and good is either independent of the gods or is arbitrary). Have I misunderstood?