No, you aren't, your post clearly demonstrated the point went right over your head. I even quoted you on the exact point where you say the same thing they are pointing out is counterintuitive. The fact that you think this is "slipping" something in or a "gotcha," demonstrates that you have missed the intent.

By saying "'Lassie is a dog; is true", they are adopting Dx as a premise. So, of course,

Ax(Dx -> Fx)
Fs
Dx
Therefore Dx

is valid.

This is counterintuitive. That's what the example is there to illustrate; it's right their in the text. Then you go off "challenging" them to show something they've never asserted.

There is an excellent book called Bernoulli's Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science
by Aubrey Clayton that points out some of the major flaws in frequentism as it is commonly put forth.

I think it's very accessible as far as math books go, and does a very good job explaining the history, even if it does sometimes seem to lurch close ad hominems in pointing out how many advocated of frequentism were social scientists trying to use statistics to advocate for eugenics.

However, I am not convinced, as Clayton seems to be, that Bayesian methods resolve the problem.

I actually think that the widespread use of information theory in the sciences (particularly physics) and as a tool to unify the sciences will make this question among the very most important questions in metaphysics in the future. If you're defining physical reality in terms of information, and defining causation in terms of computation and information transfer, then "what is information," becomes an essential question. But information is itself generally defined in terms of probability.

There is an argument that information doesn't "really" exist because in reality there is no "probability." For any system the measurements/interactions that can occur are just the measurements that do actually occur. Information is thus inherently "subjective." But since the concept is so foundational it seems that the consensus tends towards "well so much the worse for (that sort of) objectivity," and you even see arguments for information being more ontologically basic than matter or energy, the latter emerging from the former. Obviously, the merits of such positions, or even what they are saying, will depend on one's understanding of probability in the first place.

Although maybe not with as much detail as you might be, I’m of course aware of the historical evolution of concepts in relation to Plotinus’ the One and the Abrahamic (in many a way, biblical) notion of God—whereby the two otherwise quite disparate concepts were converged, tmk not by the Neoplatonists but by Abrahamic philosophers.

There more back and forth than is commonly realized. Jewish and Christian Platonism was already well established in Alexandria generations before Plotinus (e.g. Philo). The great early Christian scholar Origen was an older contemporary of Plotinus and it's not implausible that they were in the same circles since there were only so many educated people, even in a larger city like Alexandria.

A lot of Plotinus also seems quite similar to Gnostic Christian theology that was popular in Alexandria both prior to and during his lifetime. Unfortunately, we don't have much exact history to go on here so it's unclear if these ideas were just "in the air," or if Plotinus specifically borrowed them and then attempted to reify them and remove the specific Christian and Jewish context. Certainly though, the different strains of Platonism being discussed in the city had to influence each other over the years. In many ways the triumph of orthodox Christianity was also a triumph of a certain brand of neoplatonism over competing gnostic and "pagan" forms.

If (1.b.), then SD is governed by at least one telos which SD deems worthy of fulfilling (i.e., deems beneficial and thereby good). Because it is a telos (which SD understands as good), this strived for end cannot be yet actualized by SD while SD holds it as intent and thereby purposefully behaves. Moreover, and more importantly, this intent via which SD behaves purposefully cannot have logically been created by SD for, in so purposefully creating, SD will necessarily have yet been striving toward some telos (a yet unactualized future state of being) which SD deemed to be good. A purposeful SD will hence, logically, at all times be moving toward that which is (deemed to be) good without yet having actualized it as SD’s intent/end—a moved toward intent/end which is logically requite for SD to create anything purposively (very much the creation of so termed “everything”) and, hence, which cannot be the (purposeful) creation of SD. Hence, in (1.b.) one then logically obtains the following necessary consequence: SD is forever subject to (and constrained by, hence limited by, hence determined by) an intent which SD deems good which SD nevertheless in no way created.

Unfortunately, I think this is really misunderstanding the Christian tradition. It's premised on violations of God's eternal nature, divine simplicity, the Doctrine of Transcendentals, and really the Analogia Entis as well.

God can't be striving towards things "before and after." God is absolutely simple, not stretched out time. The whole of God is always present to God's self (divine simplicity implies eternal existence, "without begining or end," not simply "everlasting.")

Goodness is a transcendental property of being along with Truth, Beauty, and Unity. But God is being itself— Deus est ens—and in God (and only in God) is existence part of essence—Ipsum Esse Subsistens. God is goodness itself.

You're proposing a sort of voluntarism that I think will only make sense in a sort of post-Reformation frame where the Neoplatonic assumptions of the Patristics are intentionally stripped out, the univocity of being is asserted, etc. I think they would be more than happy to agree with you that their God is not "the God of the philosophers," but this itself is a radical break from the Patristics tradition.

Moreover, they would would deny the existence of TD since the Good is defined purely in terms of God's unfathomable will. But such conceptions are decidedly modern.

And so "society" as a whole makes imperative statements?

But then these statements are not like the utterances of a single person in many important respects. Duties are indeed something like the "imperative demands" of society as a whole, or of institutions, etc.

They are not just like imperative demands though because they define normative goods like "being a good citizen" or "being a good basketball player." A lone person saying "do this," does not define a normative good like "what it means to be a good soldier." That's a crucial difference because so much of human life and the human good is bound up in normative goods.

You're bringing up consequences again. Why do you keep doing this when you say that consequences have nothing to do with the meaning of "you ought"?

I didn't say that. Consequences and obligations are related.

Anyhow, you didn't answer the questions above. If duties are just imperative statements, who is making these statements? Isn't it a little odd that presumed duties cannot be "released" by any single individual in most cases (e.g. the lifeguard example)? What sort of imperative statement is made by no one in particular?

Who exactly makes these statements? Presumably they can also release people from them if the obligation "just is" the statement "you should do this?"

So who can go up to a lifeguard and say, "see that drowning kid? You don't have to save them," such that no one will hold them responsible for not saving the child? Who exactly can go up to the monk and say "that sacred vow? Forget about it," such that no one will see them as having reneged on their vow?

One key difference here is that obligations and duties are emergent, bigger than the imperatives of any one person.

But to make it simple, are you actually claiming that "Orestes had an obligation to avenge his father's death because that was a norm in ancient Greek culture," is a false statement? If it isn't false (it isn't) then who exactly told him "do this or else?"

The difference should be obvious here. Obligations can't be reduced to imperative statements.

Then why did you bring up undesirable consequences when I asked you to make sense of obligations?

Because you claimed "I intend to..." and "I vow to..." are functionally the same statement. The examples I gave show they are not functionally the same, people take them to mean different things and act on them differently. This is a real difference in the world. Saying "people should see them as the same because I can't understand duties," doesn't obviate this is an obvious factual difference.

Are you now saying that "you ought do this" just means "do this or you will face undesirable consequences"? Because I have no problem with this latter claim.

No. Are people widely accepted to have a duty to give a mugger their money when they demand it? Nope. Might they face harm if they refuse to do what the mugger demands? Yes.

If obligations and duties are the same thing as "someone saying do this or else," who exactly is doing the saying? Who tells Orestes "avenge your father's murder or else?" What explicit threat does he face?

The fact that Orestes had this duty, that it was socially recognized in his culture, is a historical fact. His obligation emerges from his culture and his social role, not from any particular person saying "do this or else."

You could tell me what the difference is.

In the first case changing one's mind simply reflects a change in opinion. "Oh, he finally found the right woman and decided marriage was for him." The change in opinion doesn't really reflect on the individual within the context of their culture.

In the second case, the monk changing his mind entails much else:
He has to leave his vocation and change his entire lifestyle.
He had to leave what is essentially his adopted family.
He is breaking a "sacred vow," and might be seen by many as "a bad monk."
If we consider Thomas Merton's considerable difficulties after falling in love with his nurse while in the hospital, we could also consider here that even questioning if one should break the vow can become a life defining personal struggle of immense emotional import, whereas young men claim they "don't intend to ever get married," all the time and regularly default on that claim without any concern for "what people will think of me."

The social customs and expectations at play in each situation are not the same. If the claim is that such social customs and expectations, the substance of "duty," aren't 'real,' that starts to seem to me a lot like begging the question (while also being implausible).

The quoted argument assumes that all words are universals, which is a ludicrous idea.

Where does it do that?

Language has nothing to do with univerals.

Presumably it has something to do with them since you're able to refer to them with words right here.

There is no truth in language; anyone can make a word and an arbitrary definition for it.

I am not sure how this is supposed to be taken. If there is "no truth in language," am I supposed to take it that nothing you have just expressed (in language) is true?

If I make up the world ishblaqwer and say it refers to dressers that have been painted green is this now an English word? Is it a Chinese word? Can I make up new Chinese words even though I don't speak Chinese?



Ha! I do find it sort of tedious how everything he says has to be delivered in some sort of sly turn of phrase, but on the occasions where he is right they do tend to make for great quotes.

There is a sort of reverse collective action problem here (I am blanking on the proper term). The argument might work for an individual or family. It can't work for everyone. If everyone stops all "unnecessary" economic activity in the developed world those economies will collapse, massively affecting global trade, agricultural production, vaccine production and development, etc. This would probably also reduce global stability and security. And then this would probably have a net negative impact on the developing world, both in the short and long term

By saying "'Lassie is a dog; is true", they are adopting Dx as a premise. So, of course...

Yes, that's right in there. I'm not sure how they are "slipping" it in. That's exactly the point they are making and trying to highlight. You seem to be missing the point of the example, yet you've hit on it right here.

I think you and may be supposing that the example is being called in to show something it is not being called in to show. The point being made might be more obvious in context, IIRC there is a section on how the old logic presupposes a sort of epistemic realism right before it, and to "common sense" form without realism often seems silly.

That's just a matter of defining the words. If 'dead' and 'living' are defined so that they are not mutually exclusive, then of course we don't make the inference. It's silly to claim that sentential logic is impugned with the example.

...when it comes to vamps it's deadly serious. :death: :death: :death:

Well, Kant said "ought implies can". If this is correct then one cannot be obligated to do what one cannot do. But one can promise to do what one believes one can do, even if in fact one cannot do it. Therefore, one can promise to do what one cannot do. Therefore, promises do not entail obligations

lol, this is torturous, from the appeal to authority taken out of context on down.

Again, if you think a young man saying "I don't intend to get married," and a monk vowing to never marry are functionally equivalent I don't know what to tell you.

I am not sure what the relevance of the question is. The answer would seem to be "yes," in some cases. The Spartans with King Leonidas had a duty to try to protect him against the Persian army, but clearly they were going to be incapable of doing it in the long run.



Maybe I shouldn't have used "incorporeal," due to its past associations. I really just wanted to get at how these things exist in a way that is substrate independent and without any definite/discrete "body." A recession has existence within time, it begins and ends. I think cultures, along with their laws, do as well. "Minoan culture," doesn't exist anymore, although we can certainly point to it (same with material artefacts that no longer exist, e.g. the Twin Towers).

I would say a recession exists in the same way songs do, or War and Peace, the Star Spangled Banner, punk rock, etc. I don't know if there is any equivocity at play in saying these things exist in the same way tables and rocks exist.

I wouldn't say recessions or laws are either eternal or "abstract objects."

Actually, I was thinking more of the idea of the "desire for truth," as just one desire for many, but that sentiment obviously applies in some ways too. Against this there would be the idea in Plato that the desire for what is "truly good" (practical reason) and for what is "truly true" (theoretical reason) is what allows a person to transcend current belief and desire (giveness). The switch is perhaps more clear in Kierkegaard because he seems to demote, if not knock out (always hard to tell because of the pseudonyms) theoretical reason from this part of the equation but keeps the other half.

So there is no difference between a man saying "I don't ever intend to marry," and a monk vowing to never marry? Seems pretty far fetched to me.

Taxes are seen as an obligation of good citizens. Since citizens benefit from their state they are obliged to help support it. A person who refuses to pay taxes is failing to uphold a normative good in their community. They are a "bad citizen."

By contrast, consider if a random person walks up to you and demands money. In this case there is no norm. No one will say a person has "failed to be a good citizen," or failed at fulfilling any other sort of social role/norm if they refuse to acquiesce to a random imperative statement that is not grounded in normative measure, regardless of the threats or rewards they offer up to motivate agreement.

We might argue if such norms are truly just, if they are appropriate, etc., but that doesn't change the fact that they demonstrably exist and play a widespread role in human behavior and how people think about their actions.

I should add that obligations and duties help define and give content to social roles. If "a knight has a duty to protect women and children," is just the same thing as the imperative statement "protect women and children," who exactly is making this imperative statement here? How is it that every adult member of the community knows this imperative statement applies to knights and yet not one of them could point to an specific individual as having issued it?

Does it interest you to ask what kind of thing a law is? You don't feel it must be reducible, you don't believe they're mental objects. What are they?

I feel like the right word for things like laws, recessions, culture, etc. would be "incorporeal" as in "lacking a specific body." Recessions might be an easier example. Recessions clearly exist. They have effects. They aren't exclusively mental. The causal reach of the 2008 financial crisis was global. It led to a drastic change in green house gas emissions. It led to half completed homes in Florida, "roads to nowhere" in China, etc.

Likewise laws continue to exist regardless of whether anyone is thinking of them at any particular moment. It would seem weird to say they flit in and out of existence as they enter someone's mental awareness. "Japanese culture," would be the same way. It exists in mental awareness, in synapses, in artifacts of all sorts, etc.

I do think information theory gives us some good ways to think about how such substrate independent, incorporeal entites might exist.



Obligations are a norm or rule that dictates behavior. They can be based in one's role in society, caste, profession, etc. Some people will argue that there are obligations and duties incumbent on all human beings. That seems like a more open question. The question of "do police officers have specified duties," seems like a no brainer.

I've already given an example of why duties are not the same thing as imperative sentences. They also differ in that they are widely recognized. No one needs to say "hey you, police officer, stop that criminal from breaking into that jewelry store." Every adult in the community knows that a function of the police is to prevent theft and that it is the duty of police officers to prevent thefts if they are able to without undue risk.

Obligations are recognized in the cultures or institutions they are situated in. This is not true for "all imperative commands." "Lay down your arms and come out now," yelled by an enemy soldier comes with no socially/institutionally recognized obligation. No one would say someone is "a bad soldier," for not doing what the enemy tells them to do. Soldiers are not obligated to obey imperative commands from the enemy. The same is not true for orders given by soldier's commanders. All imperative commands do not involve duties or obligations.

People are generally not confused by this difference. The idea that "if I am going to be a priest, soldier, doctor, etc. I am expected to preform certain duties," is ubiquitous. This is not any different from any other normative good.

I think Hegel's thinking here is at least partially correct, one role of institutions is to objectify obligations and duties. Obligations and duties clearly can exist outside of institutionalization. For example, it is true that in his society Orestes had an obligation to try kill his father's murderers as a surviving male child, but there was no institution set up to concretize this obligation. By contrast paying taxes are an obligation that is formalized and objectified by institutions.

I don't really think reduction is a particularly helpful endeavour in most cases, particularly not when it comes to the social sciences or history. But for the person committed to reductive materialism it seems that "personal preference," cannot be were explanation stops. Why is personal preference what it is? Well here we are going to need to call in biology, psychology, economics, sociology, history, etc. People don't have the preferences they have for no reason at all.

The driving assumption behind reductive explanations seems to generally be smallism, the idea that any facts about large scale things must be reducible to facts about smaller parts (down to some "fundemental building block"). Prima facie, I see no reason to believe this is true. A sort of bigism seems just as plausible, everything being defined in terms of its relation to the whole. So I would tend to think of laws as being dependant on things like human biology, history, etc., without necessarily being fully explicable in terms of them. For one thing, laws themselves end up affecting history, sociology, psychology, etc. The influence is bidirectional.

Why is it clearly not the case?

Because obligations are everywhere in human culture and they dictate a great deal of behavior. They show up everywhere, in economics, in law, in finance, in ethics, in dramas.

I can't tell what you mean by obligations being "incoherent." I presume that when your mechanic finishes working on your car and hands you receipt stating that you are obligated to pay him some amount you don't stand in front of him dumbfounded, unsure of what is being said to you, nor that your annual tax bill provokes complete puzzlement.

And obligations are clearly not the same thing as all imperative statements. "Watch out, those stairs are icy," is an imperative statement with no obligation. The terms of a loan, by contrast, will speak about obligations.

So I assume you mean something like: "there is no reason why people should honor obligations outside of individual preferences," or something to that effect. To claim that obligations don't exist and play no role in determining human behavior would be like claiming laws don't exist and don't determine human behavior. Even if they are reducible to something else, they certainly exist, and I think you'd be hard pressed to make a compelling argument that they reduce to "individual preferences," as some sort of unanalyzable primitive either.

Yes, but the naturalistic frame begs some sort of explanation for obligations, not claiming they "don't exist," which is clearly not the case. Likewise, for goods defined in terms of normative measure. It wouldn't make sense to say "Babe Ruth was good as baseball," has no truth value. Nor would it make sense to say "in chess the bishop can change what color square it is on," simply because it is physically possible for a player to violate the rules of chess and switch their bishop onto a new color with an illegal move.

And from a naturalistic frame explaining these simply in terms of "authority" or "sentiment" is likewise insufficient, since presumably human sentiment isn't springing forth uncaused into the world. It is either emergent from underlining processes or else reducible to them.

As for the "if... then" phrasing, this is just confusing things. In natural language if/then stands in for all sorts of entailment and implication, e.g. material, casual, etc.

It seems to me that most nominalists are motivated by naturalistic intuitions (perhaps joined to an inadequate understanding of universals as necessarily existing in some sort of "spirit realm"). As such, an explanation of obligations purely in terms of statements that burst forth from authority figures seems like it will be unsatisfactory. We will be forced to ask "but why do authority figures make these claims on people?" Not to mention that it seems hard to trace all obligations back to some single authority figure in history making a pronouncement.

Neither nominalism or fictionalism require people to claim that obligations are incoherent, nor to claim that they don't exist. They are theories describing the metaphysical underpinnings of such phenomena. Likewise, one can be a nominalist without denying that triangles exist.

Indeed, nominalists as much as anyone else often argue against realism precisely because of the "metaphysical obligations" it entails.

None of those positions entail that sentences about obligations are "incoherent." That would be quite a claim to make. Moral nihilism claims that are no facts about whether or not it is good to uphold one's obligations, not that obligations, rules, laws, etc. don't exist or lack any content. Moral nihilism need not (and usually doesn't) even claim that there are no facts about what is "good" vis-á-vis certain contexts. E g., if moral nihilism made us claim that there was no truth value to the claim "Michael Jordan was a good basketball player," it would be a pretty silly position on the face of it. Moral nihilism generally tries to divorce "moral" and "practical" reasoning to deal with this, although how well this works in practice is debatable.

I would maintain that it is a silly position, in that people are always forced to smuggle practical reasoning back into their thinking, but not quite so obviously.

What isn't clear? I'm finding it hard to believe that you cannot parse the meaning of sentences like: "soldiers are obligated to report all instances of sexual assault to their superior officers." The conditions under which this obligation is upheld or not is straightforward.

What the complaint here, that the claim that "lifeguard's primary purpose is to prevent drownings," has no truth value?

No, it means your role entails a duty to perform that action. If you don't save drowning people when you easily could have you are a bad lifeguard, just as obviously as striking out at every at bat makes you a "bad hitter" in baseball.

We might ask: "Is it good that Orestes kills his mother to avenge his father's death?" without having to claim nescience about his obligations given his membership in ancient Greek society. The fact that he is "obligated" to kill his mother under his society's norms is an objective fact. The drama comes from the fact that he is also obligated to protect and care for his mother now that his father is dead and he is the sole living son, putting two obligations into conflict. But Aeschylus' plays aren't "incoherent," they are about the difference between justice and obligation and the potential for conflict between the two.

It's "incoherent" to you that lifeguards are obligated to jump into the water when a child starts screaming "help I'm drowning," or that firefighters are obligated to try to put our fires?

I can't really imagine what the objection here is TBH.

5.56mm is occasionally used as a DMR as a compromise, because it allows the DM to use the same ammunition as the rest of a squad. But DMRs are overwhelmingly 7.62mm or some equivalent. Every military or police "sniper rifle," uses a full sized rifle round because it makes no sense to use a cartridge with poor terminal ballistics to try to hit targets at long distances.

You'd think professional assassins would know not to use 5.56mm with its garbage rainbow ballistics and would spring for 7.62mm, .30-06, or the fancy new 6.8mm 80kpsi rounds the US Army uses.

I am not sure what the ultimate relevance for moral realism will amount to in any case. If obligations are just rules in some game we "play," why is it good that we should play such games? Certainly deception can be better than honesty in some cases, e.g. promising a crazed friend that you will "give their knife right back to them" while having no intention of doing so.

If one condition for obviating any promise or obligation is just, as points out, breaking that obligation or promise, i.e. just ignoring it, what exactly does it do?

I don't see why likening morality or obligations to "truth conditionals" or "logic" helps cement morality. Why is it "good" to prefer truth to falsity or good faith arguments to bad ones?

Perhaps I am missing something since I have not followed the conversation. It seems to me that attempts to reduce practical reason to theoretical reason always seems to founder on the same rocks.

I think issues like the cat are simply mistranslations and over simplifications. The statement should be something like:

The cat is sitting across the threshold of the house, therefore some of the cat is in the house and some of the cat is in the house. This is not contradictory. The same issue is in play here: .

This seems more like a case of "user error." It's like you cannot blame a coding language for a programmer writing code that correctly instructs it to do the wrong thing. The paradoxes of material implication go beyond this sort of misuse though.



If you affirm A there is a straightforward contradiction implied (B and not-B). But the statement as a whole isn't contradictory. Consider the case where A is denied (indeed the statement implies not-A). So, think about mathematical proofs of the sort where we say something like "if A is true then B must be odd and not-odd." A number can't be odd and not odd so A must be false.

It's ok, the second term will only be 3 1/2 years long.:wink:

And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.

And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?

And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.

Revelation 13:3-5

Much of the details about Biden will be forgotten

Sure but he is President and campaigning for a second term, so he can't avoid going on TV, which means similar things will keep happening.

I imagine the long term effects are more likely to be in the form of Trump being more vindictive and focused on retribution against his political enemies after he wins again (quite possibly with the House, Senate, and Supreme Court all under GOP rule).

By all accounts he is a heavy consumer of right wing propagandatainment, and about as credulous as your average heavy user of that stuff. They will almost certainly argue that "the Democrats," (Biden, Clinton, etc.) and maybe other parties accused of rigging the election and the 2020 Riots like the Chinese Communist Party, sanctioned and helped to organize the assassination attack. So he will go in with the "they tried to kill me mindset," even if he doesn't totally believe it. "This means war," and all. Likewise, even if your median voter doesn't care much, politicos and politicians on the right will long remember it.

I would say I am 65/35 that Trump will win if Biden stays in at this point. Historically he always over preformed his polling by a lot and right now he is winning every swing state and even the popular vote.

If he wins, it's quite likely he has the House and Senate. If that happens, I'm 90/10 sure they are going to abolish the filibuster to push through a lot of new legislation to ensure they are less likely to lose elections in the future. As is, the system already heavily favors them (they have won more votes in just one election in over a third of a century and that was with the benefit of an incumbency they got while earning less votes). However, it's very clear that demographics are not on their side, and so the only two options seem to be radically changing the party, which is not really an option with Trumpism, or finding out some sort of system of minority rule.

This certainly strengthens the hand of the "Second American Revolution," camp in the GOP.

Grazed on the ear.

I can think of no worse contrast than Biden's campaign trying to talk up his "decent functioning," at his "big boy press conference," where he still managed to call his VP "Trump" and introduce Zelensky as "Putin" and Trump pumping his fist to the crowd after being shot at.

Maybe this will convince people that a viable candidate is needed (meaning probably not Harris). I doubt it.

The conservation part was the only reason I remembered it TBH.

I agree that material implication has problems, but if you want a tidy, "algorithmic" system, then these sorts of problems are inevitable.

Or one that isn't horrifically complex. I actually think that is what gets people more than the "paradoxes of implication." People can learn that sort of thing quite easily. What seems more confusing is the way in which fairly straightforward natural language arguments can end up requiring a dazzling amount of complexity to model.

A = There are vampires.
B = Vampires are dead.
Not-B = Vampires are living.

As you can clearly judge, this truth table works with Ts straight across the top, since vampires are members of the "living dead." Fools who think logic forces them to affirm ~A are like to end up missing all their blood.



You might be interested in relevance logic, which tries to deal with the paradoxes of material implication: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-relevance/

There is a section in Tractatus where Wittgenstein declares that belief in a causal nexus is a "superstition" and holds up logical implication as sort of the "real deal." I think this is absolutely backwards. We come up with the idea of logical implication from experience, from the way the world works. This is mistaking an abstraction for reality, and this is ultimately where I think the discomfort with the paradoxes come from.

There is some interesting stuff on modeling relevance logic in terms of information theory I've seen but I forget where I found it.

Let A = "Unenlightened's testimony is unreliable"
Let B = "Unenlightened tells the truth"
not B ="Unenlightened does not tell the truth"

↪Count Timothy von Icarus might note that ↪unenlightened's testimony is reliable

That's a cute one. It seems to trade off the ambiguity of translating statements into logic. Obviously when we say someone's testimony is "unreliable" what we mean is that some of their statements are true and some are not true. But there is nothing contradictory about A implying some B are C and A also implying that some B are not C, and so we won't be forced to deny A.

I think one of the challenges inherit with formal logic is that even fairly straightforward arguments of the sort you might find on some science blog or op-ed end up requiring all sorts of stuff to formally model correctly: counterfactuals, modality, temporality, etc. It gets very complex very quickly.

It's even hard with comically bad arguments like the pic below. Premises like "solar panels reflect more heat than grass or trees," and "small changes in ground temperature can cascade into large changes in weather systems, including tornado formation," are all true, but the conclusion that solar farms are "tornado incubators" is still baseless.