99% — khaled

I guess I don't fall in that category. Thanks though. Your point is worth noting.

Like "Nothing is really 'true' (except this statement)". — Isaac

The problem I see with this is not the scope so much as the "really".

Take it out and the statement is clearly wrong: "Nothing is 'true', except this statement.

↪@Joshs Ok, that's got me thinking. — Banno

So I thinked.

I'm not aware of Davidson writing anything explicitly political. Are you? So mention of political ramifications goes outside the purview of his thinking.

So this should be interesting.

...Davidson’s suggestion of locating a shared background of beliefs would fail miserably in dealing with anything but the most superficial level of thought. — Joshs

Well, i won't sell him off so quickly. His interest is in statements of what is the case, and in that regard he limits his discourse, but we can have some fun extending it. One way to proceed while keeping some of his conniving relevant would be to look at direction fo fit, as discussed in Anscombe and Searle and elsewhere. One might characterised Davidson's interest as word-to-world rather than world-to-word.

But in politics we change the world to fit the word.

So can the notion of incommensurability he is working with be used in a world-to-word language game?

I use chess games as a test case much too often. But it fits, and is at hand. Davidson might be understood as pointing out that we agree on the presence of a board and the pieces; on the squares, and perhaps even on the initial arrangement of the pieces on the board. But suppose someone does not recognise castling. The disagreement here is not as to how the world is, but how the world might be changed.

One might describe the situation as incommensurable; one player wishes to castle; the other does not recognise this as a legitimate move. This is not a disagreement as to what is the case, but as to what is to be done.

The problem I see with this is not the scope so much as the "really".

Take it out and the statement is clearly wrong: "Nothing is 'true', except this statement. — Banno

Ah, yes. I really only put that in as an example - to say that I didn't (contrary to a lot of arguments I've read) find anything wrong with the form of the proposition.

As to it's content...well I agree, my inverted commas are doing a lot of work there. As you may recall (I believe we've discussed this before?) I come from an entirely linguistic approach to truth - 'true' is just a word and it's meaning varies depending on the use it's put to in various language games. So here it's being applied to the state of the world (by which I mean all that is the case) and being used to denote uniquely high confidence, wherein there is only one thing of which we can be absolutely confident, and that is that the world is such that we cannot be absolutely confident about any of its states (except that one). Perhaps "Nothing is certain" might have been a better choice.

I think scepticism is given far more prominence than it deserves. A cultural extrusion form fablsificationism, itself an overrated notion.

I think scepticism is given far more prominence than it deserves. A cultural extrusion form fablsificationism, itself an overrated notion. — Banno

I agree actually. The amount of stuff we can believe to be the case without any problems arising massively outweighs the amount of stuff about which some doubt is useful. As we've encountered before, I think, my job requires I have a model which allows for that level of uncertainty. otherwise our best models of cognition don't work. Day-to-day (and I suppose philosophically too), it might well be useless and better replaced with a model of naive realism with occasional exceptions.

To be a law of logic, a principle must hold in complete generality
No principle holds in complete generality
____________________
There are no laws of logic.
— Gillian Russell

There are two ways to deal with this argument.

A logical monist will take the option of rejecting the conclusion, and also the second premise. For them the laws of logic hold with complete generality.

A logical pluralist will reject the conclusion and the first premise. For them laws of logic apply to discreet languages within logic, not to the whole of language. Classical logic, for example, is that part of language in which propositions have only two values, true or false. Other paraconsistent and paracomplete logics might be applied elsewhere.

A few counter-examples of logical principles that might be thought to apply everywhere. — Banno

Gillian Russell, I'm sure, has many counter-examples for every logical law there is but all of them seem rather contrived. She reminds me of contortionists assuming odd positions - some funny, others painful - just so that fae can fit inside the box of logical nihilism.



The end result is both amazing - flexibility par excellence - and repugnant - the contortionist looks like fae's been in a horrible accident!

I don't know whether to congratulate Gillian Russell or offer her my condolences.

...Davidson’s suggestion of locating a shared background of beliefs would fail miserably in dealing with anything but the most superficial level of thought.
— Joshs

His interest is in statements of what is the case, and in that regard he limits his discourse, but we can have some fun extending it. One way to proceed while keeping some of his conniving relevant would be to look at direction fo fit, as discussed in Anscombe and Searle and elsewhere. One might characterised Davidson's interest as word-to-world rather than world-to-word. — Banno

I haven’t read Anscombe and Searle on this, but the phenomenologically informed enactivist work I follow wouldn’t accept that the one direction ever proceeds independently of the other. Here perceptual processes may be instructive. When I perceive a visual pattern as something , I recognize it. Re-cognition implies two
dynamics at once. From subject to world, there is expectation derived from previous experience of what I am likely looking at. This expectation is as much intersubjectively shaped as it is subjective. The other side of the coin is the direction from world to anticipating subject. My expectations concerning what I am seeing do not univocally determine the sense for me of the phenomenon. The world contributes a novel factor that makes recognition and representation always a contextually new sense of what is being recognized.

But in politics we change the world to fit the word. — Banno

Or one could say we interpret the world according to our subjectively and intersubjectively formed expectations. But that is not limited to ‘politics’ unless you want to expand olp rica to include perception and cognition generally.

Davidson might be understood as pointing out that we agree on the presence of a board and the pieces; on the squares, and perhaps even on the initial arrangement of the pieces on the board. But suppose someone does not recognise castling. The disagreement here is not as to how the world is, but how the world might be changed. — Banno

If we agree on the things you mention, it is likely because we abstract these particulars from our understanding of their role in the playing of the game called chess by based what matters to us about it. The game is a temporal unfolding guided by rules of procedure, an agreed upon way of going on, with an agreed upon goal. When one recognizes the pieces and board as belonging to chess , one is implicitly drawing upon this background knowledge of the unfolding activity called chess. In other words , the details get their relevant sense from their relation to the larger purpose of the game as one interprets it. If I do not recognize castling, that belief forms part of the superordinate scheme that frames my sense of the details. When we begin the game, having tacitly ‘agreed’ on the pieces, board , etc, my background belief about castling is already operative in my recognition of the pieces and other subordinate details. But since this belief retains only an implicit role in our activity until the point where it becomes explcit, when I say ‘hey, you can’t do that!’, it doesn’t initially affect our agreement.

This is what I mean about agreements at a superficial level masking deeper discrepancies in outlook.

One might describe the situation as incommensurable; one player wishes to castle; the other does not recognise this as a legitimate move. This is not a disagreement as to what is the case, but as to what is to be done. — Banno

I think the issue comes down to how integrated the pieces of our knowledge are in relation to overarching pragmatic purposes and goals. Davidson seems to allow for a compartmentalization and independence in components of cognitive and language schematics that the enactivists reject.

@Banno

Playing along with Prof. Gillian Russell's general idea,

The logical law of Logical Nihilism: All logical laws have exceptions (counterexamples). This is a logical law because, we can, by expanding the interpretation, demonstrate that all logical laws have counterexamples (exceptions).

Therefore,

All logical laws have exceptions (counterexamples) must itself have (an) exception(s).

Ergo,

Some logical laws have no counterexamples (exceptions). In other words there are universal logical laws.

Ergo, logical nihilism is untenable.

What say you?

Personally, I support Lyotard’s differend. — Joshs

A copy arrived yesterday.

Enjoy

All logical laws have exceptions (counterexamples) must itself have (an) exception(s). — TheMadFool

I feel Gödel lurking here. The law that all laws have exceptions can't be applied to itself.

AN article relevant to this topic in Philosophy Now:

One Logic, Or Many?

Maybe they could re-title the article to “One Logic, Or Many, Or Just talking about something else”

@BannoQuick question:

It looks like logical nihilism is going to hinge on the Liar. It's supposed to be violating the LONC? I haven't seen other examples.

Am I understanding that correctly?

It looks like logical nihilism is going to hinge on the Liar. — frank

I don't see why you would think that.

Logical monism claim that there are logical laws that hold in absolutely all case. Logical pluralism claims that no law holds in absolutely all cases. Logical nihilism holds that logical laws do not hold in any case.

Seems to me that logical nihilism undermines the idea of there being 'necessary truths'. But how can logical nihilism be supported by rational inference when it calls the basis of rational inference into question? If there are no unconditional facts to fall back on, is it not just meaningless verbiage?

Given anti-foundationalism, would some forms of postmodernism amount to logical nihilism?

But how can logical nihilism be supported by rational inference when it calls the basis of rational inference into question? If there are no unconditional facts to fall back on, is it not just meaningless verbiage? — Wayfarer

A performative contradiction?

So "there are no logical laws" becomes a logical law, with the obvious problematic. In the article Russel formalises logical laws as of the form Γ⊨φ:

The reason is this: a natural interpretation of the claim that there is no logic is that the extension of the relation of logical consequence is empty; there is no pairing of premises and conclusion such that the second is a logical consequence of the first. — P.4

On that account "there are no logical laws" is not of the form Γ⊨φ, avoiding the problematic.

You are right, and in your terms, for a logical nihilist, the truth of "there are no logical laws" cannot be the result of a strict inference.

That leaves open other forms of ratiocination. If, as they argue, for every given logical law a counterexample can be presented, then one might induce that there are no logical laws.

...would some forms of postmodernism amount to logical nihilism? — Tom Storm

Some post modernists might well reject deduction. It takes all sorts to make a world.

It looks like logical nihilism is going to hinge on the Liar.
— frank
I don't see why you would think that. — Banno

That's just the first example given of shooting down so-called laws of logic in G Russell's article.. The PhilosophyNow article focuses on what strikes me as word games. Statements of opinion aren't true or false, so bivalence is defied?

Logical monism claim that there are logical laws that hold in absolutely all case. Logical pluralism claims that no law holds in absolutely all cases. Logical nihilism holds that logical laws do not hold in any case. — Banno

Does the situation compare to moral nihilism? A logical nihilist recognizes that there are logical laws in play, but they hold by fiat? So there may not be a huge difference between nihilism and pluralism?

That leaves open other forms of ratiocination. If, as they argue, for every given logical law a counterexample can be presented, then one might induce that there are no logical laws. — Banno

It might also indicate that logic has limits, which is not the same as to say that it isn't universally applicable within those limits. Graham Priest's diathetheism comes to mind although that too I interpret as an exploration of the limitations of logic.

It might also indicate that logic has limits — Wayfarer

You'd love that.

Rather I take the flow of the argument here to be that there are a multiplicity of logics, to be applied in many and various cases. It's more about the removal of limits to logic. Roughly, if you come across a case in which logic seems not to apply, then you are using the wrong logic.

Statements of opinion aren't true or false — frank

Why not? "Frank thinks statements of opinion are neither true nor false" seems to be true...

Does the situation compare to moral nihilism? — frank

The Philosophy Now article draws that analogy. I don't think it goes very far, partly for the reasons given above. Perhaps the logical monist says "this is how you ought think", the nihilist says "It doesn't matter what you think", the pluralist, "this is how we show if your thinking is consistent"

Statements of opinion aren't true or false
— frank
Why not? "Frank thinks statements of opinion are neither true nor false" seems to be true... — Banno

That was in the PhilosophyNow article. We could do a read through.

Perhaps the logical monist says "this is how you ought think", the nihilist says "It doesn't matter what you think", the pluralist, "this is how we show if your thinking is consistent" — Banno

Russell mentioned that logical nihilists don't tend to measure up to the name. They do recognize the application of something like logical laws.

We could do a read through. — frank

Happy to. Might be best if you take the lead, so you can highlight the points you see as salient.

:up: mañana

Rather I take the flow of the argument here to be that there are a multiplicity of logics, to be applied in many and various cases — Banno

Kinda like Sliding Doors, right? Multiverse stuff? That kind of thing? Am I warm?

Not so much. More like different ways of speaking.

The Russell article was over my head, and the PhilosophyNow article didn't have enough meat, so I'm going with the SEP article on logical pluralism.

First we look at case-based logical pluralism. This is the GTT:

Generalised Tarski Thesis (GTT):
An argument is valid-x if and only if in every case-x in which the premises are true, so is the conclusion.

Case based logical pluralism is saying that the terms in the GTT are not precise enough to rule out a plurality of meanings for "valid" and "case." Different senses of these terms will give us different logics.

I don't think this is actually the kind of logical pluralism I was thinking of though. This is just an issue with terminology. It's no threat to logical monism as far as I can see. What follows is arguments for and against it.

I went through the argument(s) for pluralism and it made no sense to me. It seemed the proponents are already using alternate logic, so my strategy is to move on to objections, hoping that will at least help me understand what pluralist are saying.

The first objection is what passed through my mind as I was reading the definition of pluralism:

"One way to object to logical pluralism via cases is to agree that “case” is underspecified and admits of various interpretations, while rejecting the further step that those interpretations correspond to different relations of logical consequence. One way to do this is to insist on the largest domain for the quantifier “every” in the GTT. There is a tradition in logic that holds that for an argument to be logically valid, the conclusion must be true in unrestrictedly all cases in which the premises are true; if there are any cases at all—anywhere, of any kind—in which the premises are true and the conclusion not, then the argument is invalid. The One True Logic, then, is the one that describes the relation of truth-preserv is uyt[ation over all cases—where “all” is construed as broadly as possible." --SEP

The fly in the ointment: the Liar. Up next.