• Naming and Necessity, reading group?
    The very same statement that is being denied has been used throughout this thread, and in the book that the thread is about. — creativesoul
    If I were to hear somebody say such a thing I would ask them what on Earth they were on about. Fortunately, I have never heard anybody say such a thing. And I have only ever seen it written in a context of people arguing over philosophy of language. — andrewk
  • Naming and Necessity, reading group?
    Nixon is a family name. It's not a matter of saying I wish I had called my son Nick instead of Dick. — Metaphysician Undercover
    Yes, that's a very important factor, to which I devoted considerable thought when wondering in what sort of a counterfactual 'Nixon might not have been named "Nixon" ' could make sense. But its importance requires subtlety and thoughtfulness to spot.
  • Naming and Necessity, reading group?
    Parents talk about naming their kids all the time, and what names they would have had if such-and-such! — Snakes Alive
    And those conversations have context, which makes the meaning clear. That's the whole point. Fish a statement out of its context and stand it up by itself and it becomes ambiguous at best, meaningless at worst.

    I suggest you read the posts to which you respond more carefully before firing off responses. I wrote 'in isolation' twice above, and with very deliberate intent, yet you seem to have missed both.
  • Naming and Necessity, reading group?
    intuitions that perfectly normal sentences are things that we can't analyze for some reason? — Snakes Alive
    Perfectly normal? Have you ever heard somebody say such a thing out of the blue?

    All I can say is that, if you regard that as a perfectly normal sentence when uttered in isolation, your life experience of conversation must have been radically different from mine.
    This is the most baffling thing I've ever heard. — Snakes Alive
    I find that surprising. But nevertheless I am chuffed to learn that I have that unique honour and I thank you for notifying me.
  • Quality of education between universities?
    Is the quality of the population ('a good or a great student') adequately captured by tests like the SAT or GMAT that limit admittance to schools with higher ranking? — Wallows
    My limited observation is that you are likely to get a better education at a uni that is respectable and competent, but not fashionable, which means ruling out anything with a high ranking in the uni rankings lists. I think that, provided the lecturers know their stuff (which means staying away from tinpot things like Jerry Falwell University), you are likely to get a better education from a medium-ranked uni because the administration and lecturers will be trying harder to win students, rather than resting on their laurels about how many papers have been published from their research.

    If you're looking for entry into a high-flying profession, it may help to have a degree from an elite university, as in some places recruiters are snobs that prefer people from those than from medium unis. I am fortunate that where I live, people mostly don't care about that. They just look at whether the degree is from a reasonable uni that they've heard of, what subjects you studied and what marks you got.
  • Naming and Necessity, reading group?
    ↪Snakes Alive
    I am saying that:

    (1) they are ambiguous, and need more detail to clarify the particular meaning, and

    (2) as stated and in isolation, it would be extraordinary for somebody to say it - and the same goes for your statement about John. It is not part of normal language, does not warrant analysis, and any analysis that is conducted of it tells us nothing about how language is used. There are certainly longer statements that bear some superficial similarity to it, that one could imagine being used (eg Pat says 'Oh Richard, I do love you and want to marry you, but I wish you had a Scottish name like McGillicuddy instead of plain old Nixon. I always fancied having a long, exotic last name'), but the context of those statements makes the meaning clear, which is not the case for 'Nixon might not have been named "Nixon" '.
  • Naming and Necessity, reading group?
    "Nixon might not have been named 'Nixon' " is as clear as a bell. — creativesoul
    Not to me.

    If I were to hear somebody say such a thing I would ask them what on Earth they were on about. Fortunately, I have never heard anybody say such a thing. And I have only ever seen it written in a context of people arguing over philosophy of language.

    I'm not saying it can't be made sense of, given a good deal of additional explanation. But that explanation is needed, and that need means it is definitely not 'as clear as a bell'.

    Here, for comparison, are some statements that are 'as clear as a bell':

    - I am hungry.
    - I admire Nixon
    - All dogs are mammals
    - What is your name?
    - Take your hands OFF that red, auto-destruct button!
  • The Vegan paradox
    It doesn't follow because (2) is just an assertion. I make the opposite assertion, that an ethical vegan, by virtue of bringing veganism into the realm of ethics, elevates what should be a pragmatic method for achieving a moral good to the status of a moral good itself. — Isaac
    2 is a definition, not an assertion. If you want to define 'ethical vegan' as somebody that believes it is always immoral not to be a vegan unless one's life depends on consuming animal products, go ahead.

    If your complaint is against such people then I have no interest in contesting it as I do not agree with the underlined claim.

    I just want to point out that large numbers of people who are vegan for ethical reasons do not fit your definition of 'ethical vegan', and that there is nothing inconsistent or incoherent about being a vegan for ethical reasons and rejecting the underlined claim.
  • Quality of education between universities?
    ↪Wallows
    Most university rankings I am aware of are dominated by publications, so are not a good indicator of the quality of teaching and assessment, which are what is critical to students.

    To get good teaching, you'd be wanting smaller class sizes and a minimum of multiple choice testing, and very strict quality control on exam papers when multiple choice is used. How one obtains information about that, I don't know.
  • The Vegan paradox
    The claim is that veganism is moral — Isaac
    Even if that were the claim, it would not follow that the vegan making it also believes that not being vegan is immoral.

    Let's go back to basics:
    • 1. A vegan is a person who does their best to avoid consuming animal products, or buying them for their own use.
    • 2. An ethical vegan is a vegan that believes it is ethical to seek to minimise the net suffering of animals, and that their remaining a vegan helps towards that goal.

    How does it follow from 1 and 2 that an ethical vegan must believe that anybody who is not either a vegan or needs animal products to survive is acting unethically?

    Further, how does it follow from the bulleted points that a claim made by an ethical vegan about the ethics of a certain act of consumption of animal products, or about a type of consumption by a group of people, is irrelevant to their being an ethical vegan unless the claim matches the one underlined above?

    It is not enough to show that some ethical vegans have made claims like the underlined one. You need to show that it is a necessary consequence of being an ethical vegan that one believes that claim.

    You won't be able to, because I know ethical vegans that do not believe the claim.
  • The Vegan paradox
    The aim of ethical-veganism is to is not just to reduce animal suffering and it is to reduce animal suffering through eliminating animal products. — Isaac
    You are confusing the end with the means.
    What if the best way to reduce suffering overall in the long term included using some animal products? — Isaac
    And here you are confusing the societal with the individual. A vegan could easily recognise that for society in its entirety, an ideal configuration may involve some aggregate consumption of animal products. That doesn't necessarily imply anything about what an individual should eat in this far-from-perfectly-configured society, where the majority of animal products available to urban dwellers are produced in a tremendously cruel way, and it is very hard for an urban dweller to have any confidence in the extent to which the production of a given animal product did not involve unnecessary cruelty.
  • The Vegan paradox
    Vegans can make all sorts of claims, but the only ones relevant to a discussion about veganism are the ones related to the elimination of animal products. — Isaac
    No.

    The aim of the suffering-based version of ethical-veganism is to reduce animal suffering. Veganism is simply a practical means to do that. It happens that it is also the only practical means available to most urban dwellers at a reasonable financial cost.

    I see no support for your claim that the only moral claims by a vegan that are relevant to a discussion of veganism are those that relate to elimination of animal products. Again your assertion is too strong. If you want to keep it at that level of strength, you need to provide an argument as to why claims by ethical-vegans, that people ought to live in a way that minimises the net increase of animal suffering, are not relevant to a discussion of veganism. Your Godwin-exemplifying diversion above doesn't come close.
  • The Vegan paradox
    Given that they think other people can have committed moral wrongs on the basis of their morality, they must be moral realists, that's just the definition of the term. — Isaac
    No, it isn't. A moral relativist is as capable of making a moral claim to another person as a moral absolutist is. If they share the same moral axioms (which seems to be the case here, as most participants in this thread appear to be approaching it from a utilitarian base), then it's a disagreement about what strategy maximises compliance with the axioms - ie an argument over implementation.

    Even in the less frequent cases where the values are not shared, there is nothing to stop two moral relativists arguing with one another using rhetoric to try to win over the other to greater sympathy with their base values.
  • The Vegan paradox
    It's blindingly obvious from both the language used ('murder', 'torture', 'bad', 'stubborn omnis'...) and the sustained campaign, that people like NKBJ and Chatterbears think that non-vegans (with the exception of those who have to eat meat for survival) are committing a moral wrong. — Isaac
    If you have an argument against what those two individuals have said then your argument is with them, and there's no point in taking it up with me. What I do not accept is your blanket statements about vegans.

    you're just playing burden-of-proof tennis with me — Isaac
    I often find myself in that position. Probably because my most strongly held philosophical position is anti-dogmatism - recognising that it is very difficult to be certain about anything, and that most dogmatic claims are unsupportable. That includes claims that vegans are inconsistent in the rationale underlying their practices (as opposed to the more specific claim that a certain argument made by a particular vegan is inconsistent, or doesn't stand up to scrutiny, which has a better chance of being supportable).

    If you make big claims, expect to be asked for big arguments. It seems to me that the most sensible response to that standard is to scale back the scope of one's claims.
    I'm claiming that those vegans who make a moral claim must, by definition, be making a moral claim that it is bad to eat meat or use animal products unless absolutely necessary for immediate survival. If you think there's a reason to think otherwise, perhaps you could actually state it — Isaac
    Yes, I think otherwise. There are plenty of other moral claims an ethical vegan can make. For instance they might say that it is immoral to eat a product the consumption of which leads to a net increase in animal suffering. That would exclude hunter gatherers and also people who eat cleanly-killed game. It could even exclude meat production in the manner advocated and exemplified by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. The moral claim that is made depends on the vegan.

    Again your claims are too broad and too dogmatic.
  • Naming and Necessity, reading group?
    Which person are we talking about again that could have been named otherwise, but was not? — creativesoul
    Hmm, that's a more interesting and complex question than I thought at first. The actual-world properties by which we identify the person depend on what our counterfactual is. Given this counterfactual is about them (1) having a different name - presumably at birth, since it is their surname, and (2) not entering politics, we need a way to identify him using information prior to the birth. We can try to do that via the parents, but without necessarily using the name Nixon. We could envisage them changing the name by deed poll but, given the counterfactual is about feeling that one might have aristocratic lineage, that wouldn't really satisfy the purpose of the counterfactual. The name Schuyler would have to go back a few generations into his ancestry at least.

    One way to achieve it while minimising the differences from this world would be to imagine a world in which there is no surname "Nixon", and everybody with surname 'Nixon' in this world has 'Schuyler' in the other world. In all other respects the world would be identical to this up to the naming ceremony of Richard Milhous Schuyler/Nixon.

    In light of that I'd say the person we are talking about is the person that, in the alternate (actual) world, was born in Yorba California as the male second child of the Quaker couple Francis A Schuyler (Nixon) and Hannah Schuyler (Nixon), née Milhous.

    It's all a bit weird, but that's counterfactuals for you. Few of them make much logical sense.
  • Naming and Necessity, reading group?
    ↪Wallows
    :up:
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    The Dems should offer border security (not necessarily wall) money in return for a meamingful solution for DACA and the TPS program (both supported by a majority of the public). — prothero
    Is that possible? I thought the standoff was precisely because Trump won't sign any funding bill unless it contains money specifically earmarked for his wall.
  • Naming and Necessity, reading group?
    ↪Wallows
    Indeed, I had the liar sentence in mind as I was writing that. The similarities are strong. I also agree that it is fun to play around with such sentences. We only get ourselves into a muddle if we start to believe it tells us anything about how people really use language.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    ↪prothero
    My interpretation is that it was never intended to be a meaningful offer. He just wants to be able to add the announcement to a list of purported 'attempts to compromise' that he'll point to in order to try to win the PR war.

    It's not a bad PR strategy. But there are serious doubts about whether it can gain any traction.
  • Naming and Necessity, reading group?
    ↪creativesoul
    This has already been covered here.
  • Abortion and premature state of life
    ↪TheMadFool
    The two rights that come immediately to my mind are the right to drink and the right to vote. I don't see those as related to personhood. I imagine the intent of the first prohibition is to protect children from the harmful effects of ingesting alcohol, while the second is perhaps to protect society from having its government elected by people who have no understanding of what they're voting for (Yes I've left that gate wide open. Charge in if you must)
  • Abortion and premature state of life
    Do you not value your future Tim, are you looking forward to dinner tonight? — Rank Amateur
    This goes to the elusive 'is death a deprivation?' question, that has respectable supporters of both sides, eg Shelley Kagan and Epicurus say No, while Thomas Nagel and (unless my memory is tricking me) Bernard Williams say Yes. It is usually raised in the context of the 'is there any reason to fear one's own death?' discussion.

    Perhaps its a feeling rather than something that can be logically argued. I don't feel it would be a deprivation for me if I were to suddenly die or be killed, because I wouldn't be around to experience the deprivation - no matter how much I were looking forward to dinner.

    But somebody's sudden death would in most cases be a deprivation for their friends and others that know them and like their company, because it is depriving those people of the society of the deceased, not to mention upsetting them greatly. Sudden, unexpected death is also usually a negative experience for anybody else that witnesses it, regardless of whether they know the deceased.
  • Abortion and premature state of life
    I guess the problem boils down to when a fetus becomes a person — TheMadFool
    Yes, my perception is that it's exactly that, and the more cool-headed analyses on both sides of the argument approach it that way.
    Religion and science are head-to-head on the matter. — TheMadFool
    I don't think science has a position on that question. Nor, for that matter, do most religions. 'Personhood' is a strictly philosophical concept. It involves (philosophical, ie qualia-based) consciousness, about which science says nothing.
  • Abortion and premature state of life
    "Anyone can uses references [whilst] misrepresenting"

    Ah, ha! Lives in the UK, "whilst" he posts on TPF.     — Bitter Crank
    There's another one here:
    the suffering of friends and relatives and the fear of death whilst facing it. — Andrew4Handel
    Don't you just love "whilst"? :heart:

    I am going to train myself to use it.
  • Naming and Necessity, reading group?
    There's an example with a proper name subject right there. — Snakes Alive
    It's later in the same sentence, and relies on the setup that is done in the first part of the sentence, which meticulously avoids using a proper name as subject.

    By the way, I'm not suggesting nobody would ever say your Nixon sentence. I've already noted that somebody might express it that way facetiously. It's also possible that somebody might say it non-facetiously if they hadn't given much thought to how to express the idea they had in mind. In such a case, the likely outcome would be confusion and/or mirth, a request for clarification and a re-expression of the sentence. Which means the sentence is unclear. Which means it's a meaningless waste of time to write long dissertations about what it 'really means'.
    Take the fucking L, man. — Snakes Alive
    I haven't come across that idiomatic expression before. I like it! What does it mean? Is it a reference to the elevated railway, which in some US cities is colloquially referred to as 'the L'?
  • The Vegan paradox
    ↪Isaac
    I know what you meant by ethical realism. I just don't accept that it implies what you say it does. If you think you have an argument why it does, it would be worthwhile to discuss that.
  • Naming and Necessity, reading group?
    ↪creativesoul
    The difference between the two sentences is not just the quotes but also the word 'called'. I don't think anybody in this thread has written a sentence of the second sort.

    My understanding of common usage is that quotes are not required around a word to indicate it is a mention rather than a use when that is already implied by the context. The word 'called', which you slyly omitted from your second sentence, provides that context.

    By all means contest my idea of what common usage is - it's only an impression. But don't critique a sentence that nobody has written.
  • Naming and Necessity, reading group?
    ↪Snakes Alive
    Thanks for the example. It exactly demonstrates my point. The subject of the sentence is 'The capital of England', not 'London', as you seem to believe.

    Now, why do you think the writer made that choice?
  • Naming and Necessity, reading group?
    The 'Nixon might not have been named Nixon' sentence is a classic example of how analytic philosophy often disappears up its own fundament, by agonising over the meaning of a sentence that nobody would ever use, and claiming that the analysis is somehow relevant to how people do use language.

    Consider a long discussion between friends about Nixon, encompassing his life story, Watergate, his achievements and failures as POTUS and as VPOTUS before that. After the first few sentences of the discussion nobody uses the name Nixon, except when needed to distinguish him from another person that is mentioned in the same sentence. They just use 'he' or 'him', because everybody knows who they are talking about, and will have both the name and a DD in mind.

    One of the friends has a theory that Nixon experienced dissonance from being a patrician mind in a plebeian creature (in terms of ancestry, education and so on). They wonder whether he would have pursued a different life course if he had one of the names of American aristocracy, like Schuyler. So they might say:

    'Just say he had been called not Nixon but Schuyler, do you think he would still have gone into politics?'

    The subject of the question is not identified by the name 'Nixon' but rather by 'he', which refers to the person the friends have all been talking about. There is no de re / de dicto distinction in this sentence, because the subject is not identified by a word ('Nixon') or DD that is capable of such a distinction.

    If a passer-by hears the sentence and asks who it is about, the response might be 'We are talking about Richard Nixon, the POTUS in 1969'. But being told that doesn't mean the passer-by will take that DD and substitute it for 'he' in the question. People don't think like that. They just note the explanation, conjure up their mental image of Nixon and then reconsider the question with that mental image in mind for the 'he'.

    The corresponding sentence that all the analytical divagation concerns itself with would be something like:

    'Just say Nixon had not been called Nixon, but was called Schuyler instead, do you think he would still have gone into politics?'

    I contend that somebody would not say it that way unless they were being facetious, hoping to get a laugh from the circle with their little play on words. If they seriously wanted to consider the influence of his name on the man that in this world was POTUS in 1969, they would say it something like the first way above.

    In short: analysis of whether the utterance 'Nixon might not have been named "Nixon"' has a meaning, and if so what, has nothing to do with how humans use language.
  • The Vegan paradox
    That's a dramatic swipe at the whole of ethical theory. — Isaac
    You might need to substantiate that claim.
  • The Vegan paradox
    ↪chatterbears
    It was great to see such a technical, dispassionate destruction of the claims. But it'll have no impact on Piers Morgan, who has about as much respect for objectivity, logic and facts as the US president.
  • The Vegan paradox
    ↪Sir2u
    That's good isn't it? If we want fewer people to buy phones containing the products of forced child labour, the primary audience we need to address is people that own and regularly replace their phones. Who knows how many of them have changed their habits after downloading and reading the material?
  • The Vegan paradox
    ↪Isaac
    Statement 1 is only correct if we replace 'Vegans' by 'Some vegans'. But that constraint may not necessarily harm your argument. However I can see no reason why anybody should believe either 2 or 3.
  • The Vegan paradox
    ↪Isaac
    I asked you for evidence that vegans generally assert what you say they do. You provided some quotes from this thread, which I then showed do not show they generally assert that. You've now replied by arguing against or criticising the quotes, which completely misses the point.

    Here's the point again:

    You claim that vegans generally argue that it is always and everywhere wrong to consume animal products. I don't believe your claim.

    The onus is on you to support your claim. Arguing against random statements by various vegans does nothing to support your claim. If everything that every vegan ever said was always wrong, it would do nothing to support your claim that they make the italicised statement.
  • The Vegan paradox
    I don't read anything in those quotes that even hints at the idea that these pronouncements only apply to a particular subsection of society, do you? — Isaac
    I suggest you read them more carefully. Some refer to the meat industry - irrelevant to somebody who only eats what they kill. Another says veganism is an easy choice - clearly that is not aimed at hunter gatherers, for whom it would mean death. One talks about 'our morals' and hence can only be referring to people with the same moral framework as themself. The last one says that being vegan avoids engaging in a bad act. If you interpret that as meaning that not being vegan always means you are engaging in a bad act, you are committing the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent.

    The 'typical vegan' against whom you are railing is made of straw.
  • The Vegan paradox
    And thus far, these are the only sorts of vegans I have encountered posting about the subject on philosophy forums (our current medium of discourse). I don't argue this way with everyone I meet who happens to be a vegan. — Isaac
    Perhaps you're referring to discussions you've had elsewhere, because looking back over your interactions on this thread, your only interaction with a vegan is with NKBJ, and your criticism of them doesn't touch on whom they would like to see adopting veganism, but rather is about the issue of how comparable adopting veganism for ethical reasons is to other ethically-driven harm-reduction activities.

    If someone has been arguing in this thread that nobody, anywhere, ever, should eat meat - not even indigenous hunter gatherers - then I've missed it. Perhaps you could point it out.
  • The Vegan paradox
    why would you advocate a moral system which relies on a failure in uptake — Isaac
    Only on uptake at a level that is way beyond what we know would ever occur. If you reflect on it, I think you'll find that a great deal of moral advocacy that people do would cause terrible disruption if everybody took its advice. They are aimed at increasing the number of people doing whatever it is, confident in the knowledge that, at best, the proportion may increase from a small minority to a medium-sized minority. It's perfectly sensible. It's just pragmatism.
    Veganism is a philosophy because it makes ethical statements and ethics is part of philosophy. — Isaac
    No. Veganism is a diet. Look it up. There are many different reasons why people are vegan, only some of which have anything to do with ethics, and there is more than one ethical angle that leads to a vegan diet. We've been over this already.

    Next, since a diet is personal, it doesn't imply anything about what others should do. Evangelical ethics-based vegans may make 'ought' statements about it, but there will be great variety amongst what those people say. Plenty limit their advocacy to urban people whose only access to animal-based products is the factory-farmed stuff in supermarkets. They would have nothing to say about your idyllic, bucolic existence where you have the luxury of eating only free-range, clean-killed deer.

    I think you're either only listening to the most extreme vegan evangelists - people like Gary Francione - or just taking it all too personally, and interpreting messages that are meant for the urban majority as being also directed at you in your unusual situation.

    I suggest you just relax and be glad that the concerns that bother most ethical vegans, about animals leading miserable lives ending in a terrifying, prolonged and brutal killing process, do not apply to you. Why not just enjoy your privilege?
  • The Vegan paradox
    In fact I've made it very clear in just about every post that I'm talking about the philosophy 'veganism' — Isaac
    Yes, I remember that. In reply I pointed out that veganism is a practice, not a philosophy, so trying to critique it as a philosophy is a category error.
    If we all stopped..... — Isaac
    When more than 50 per cent of the world's population is vegan, we can start worrying about that. I don't think that will happen in the lifetime of anybody currently alive.
    veganism is suggesting we attack the problems in these systems not by carefully and respectfully making small changes — Isaac
    You mean like the careful, respectful, slow, incremental way that we introduced factory farming and modern industrial agriculture more generally?
  • If plants could feel pain would it be immoral to eat?
    I just removed a sub-thread that had nothing to do with the OP and was unnecessarily personal. Please stay on topic and try to be nice. :smile:
  • The Vegan paradox
    ↪NKBJ
    Yes, I find Gary Francione's public advocacy of his position regrettable. It is so extreme and absolutist that it just encourages people to conclude 'I can't achieve that, so why bother trying at all', and going off to fry up some factory-farmed bacon and battery-hen eggs.
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