Hrm! Apparently I didn't dig deep enough. Those labs would both be a lot of fun to work in.

There is deduction in math and logic; everyone else has to make do with induction, abduction, probability. — Srap Tasmaner

That is -- making shit up and then seeing if it works(and finding that it usually does not). Though in school I call it "Guess and check"

The division between philosophy and literature is not so clear. — Fooloso4

Yup. My inclination is to reduce philosophy to literature.

The question of the OP is, in part, can we find the path to these qualities by examining the peculiar nature of philosophical reflection? — J

First, excellent OP. I hesitated to respond until you gave me something more specific to latch onto.

I'd say we can, but that we don't need to.

If philosophy is only reflection then clearly there's something "higher" than philosophy -- action, life, experience, whatever you want to call it.

We can reflect forever (and I ought note that this is a feature, not a bug): but I think that philosophy touches upon what we do.

Or, at least, I see action as a part of philosophy.

Which makes the idea of philosophy as the highest discourse a bit hard to follow. -- though you've made me think of Ian Hacking's Elevator Words in The Social Construction of What?. Take a gander at page 31* of the pdf and page 21* of the printed page numbers and tell me what you think.

*They are the same page with a subsection titled OBJECTS, IDEAS, AND ELEVATOR WORDS -- that's the section I mean. His notion of elevation seemed similar to your idea about higher discourse.

EDIT: Though I'm laughing upon rereading where the examples for nonfancy commonsensical actions is (throwing a ball, rape) -- OK! What about (throwing a ball, theft)? lol. But I suppose that's the continental in me. Also, I don't think I'd draw the division as Hacking does, it's just a text to riff from that came to mind.

:heart: :broken:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The key is to ensure that any contact is purely transactional- just enough to meet the basic requirements of existence, without letting it spiral into further emotional entanglements. — schopenhauer1

So what do I owe you?

I suppose I don't really care if we call it democracy or whatever -- if our political actions lead us to war I take that as a sign that something is wrong. But imperialism demands war until everyone is eliminated.

I think once we start justifying the horrors of war in the name of the good we've lost sight of the good.

Well, according to Wikipedia, authority on all knowledge :D --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle

In Athens, he probably experienced the Eleusinian Mysteries as he wrote when describing the sights one viewed at the Mysteries, "to experience is to learn" (παθεĩν μαθεĩν

So seems others' agree with you based on reading his texts.

I was just thinking if you had something definitive like that it would likely be published or publishable. Ancient evidence is always sketchy and requires lots of interpretation from multiple experts. It's really interesting because of that, but it's definitely difficult to ascertain lots of specifics that one might ask.

Heh. Fair.

I'm not sure it's obvious Plato did due to the cave analogy. Would it be that hard for an aristocrat to hear the tales people tell and reforge them to demonstrate a point? He may have even been there, but the analogy -- especially given its literary form -- doesn't give clear evidence about Plato either way.

He could have heard it from someone else enough times to forge a myth that appealed to the people around him without attending.

Do you have any evidence to suggest that Aristotle went through the Eleusinian Mystery ceremonies? — I like sushi

I think this is so far back in history that if you had some clear evidence you could publish a paper on it.

Ooooo... makes good wine!

Oh, either/or. I'm not picky. It's the Epicure in me.

Only if it pays in both carrots and tomatoes and turnips.

Well, it's not the first time, it won't be the second time...

I'm not offering an answer here, just pointing out that the difference between formal and informal languages is more intractable than it might appear. — Banno

Hey, that's my job! :D

yeah it seems hard to emphasize the parenthetical points if we only typed it out in lowercase without punctuation.

Heh I wouldn't be surprised if I made a few mistakes.

I did write it out while following the symbols though :D -- but I take your point that it's not something I'd ever say outside of logic.

∀x ∃y ∀z ((P(x) ∧ ∃u (Q(y) ∨ (R(u) ∧ ∀v (S(v) → T(z, v))))) → ¬(∀w (U(w) ∧ ∃t (V(x, t) → W(t, w))) ∧ ∃p(X(p) ∧ ∀q (Y(q) → Z(p, q)))) ∨ (A(x, y, z) ∧ ∀b ∃c (D(b, c) → (E(x, b, c) ∧ ∃d (F(d) ∧ G(d, x, y))))) — TonesInDeepFreeze

For all x there exists a y for all z such that if P is a property of x and there exists a u such that -- Q is a property of y or u is a property of R and allv's such that if v is S then the orderd pair z,v is T then it is not the case for all w such that w is U and there exists a t such that if t,x is V then t, w is W AND there exists p such that p is X and All q such that if q is Y then the ordered pair p q is Z OR x, y, z is A and for all b there exists a c such that (if the ordered pair c, b is D then x, b,c is E and there exists a d such that d is F and d, x, y is G.



Obviously.

they have lost the song and are left with only noise. — unenlightened

...though part of my interest here is also in how it seems plausible that sound would effect things in a strictly physical analysis, and if you replicate effects you'll observe consequences, and the whole project can superficially be read as obvious woo.

I stopped 1/2-way through the video you linked because the studies they cited all had the same problem, and that's more or less what I saw when I looked into this. (tho tell me if I ought continue)

But the idea is super interesting and could be rigorously tested without much of a theory. Lots of good data could be produced on the question that controlled and tested for so, so many things. It's just seen as too magical.

For me I like the idea of finding ways of making the songs make sense in the noise, to utilize your metaphor.

Keep 'em coming.

I like to be corrected -- it helps me learn. Alot of this is fuzzy in my head so I'm all ears -- formal training was an eternity ago, light, and now I just read logic books on my own in my free time for fun like a nerd.

Learning is one of the nice things about TPF.

Isn't formal language a part of natural language? — Banno

I agree with on truth, or at least that's basically been an intuition that my other argument in the other logic thread relies upon, and I'm suspicious of substitution with respect to natural language -- it has more boundaries to it than we'd formally expect. That's why I conceded the point to @TonesInDeepFreeze about ironic statements, in natural language, don't fit the form of the OP.

@Srap Tasmaner -- My introduction to propositional logic and set theory came from a math class, so I do think there's some overlap between math and logic. What makes me hesitate to reduce logic to math has more to do with thinking about informal logic as still a part of logic, even though it doesn't behave in the same manner as formal logic -- at least by my consideration. I can understand a reductio without a formalization of it, and it always seems to me that that underlying, vague intuition of reasoning is basically what we check our formalisms against, in particular circumstances.

Oh, nitpick away. I don't pretend to have a mastery here -- just an interested person who doesn't mind being corrected.

So "P → Q" can be read as "P is contained within Q", and it makes sense of material implication because P can be empty set, which is a member of every set.

Okay. I was twisting things around with probability because of the example, but they're not related.

I flip these values accidentally in my mind all the time. I could just be confusing myself. When stating it in terms of probability space my thought is that we can look at A and its negation as a probability space -- say a quarter that's fair has a 50 percent chance to land heads, and since there is only one other possibility (we could call it "Not-heads") we can deduce that not-heads' probability "is contained within", i.e. determined by, the probability of Heads.

Sort of thinking about future events in analogue to the bag of different colored marbles -- George is late has 99 white marbles, George is on time has 15 red marbles, and George doesn't show up is 1 black marble.

I find the visualization helpful. We're just doing Venn diagram stuff here. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes that's very helpful, thanks. I was getting lost in the idea of a probability space and how that relates to "contains in", but the visualization makes it quite literal and easy to comprehend.

So going back to

Ask yourself this: would "George will not open tomorrow" be a good inference? And we all know the answer: deductively, no, not at all; inductively, maybe, maybe not. But it's still a good bet, and you'll make more money than you lose if you always bet against George showing up, if you can find anyone to take the other side.

"George shows up" may be a non-empty set, but it is a negligible subset of "George is scheduled to open", so the complement of "George shows up" within "George is scheduled", is nearly coextensive with "George is scheduled". That is, the probability that any given instance of "George is scheduled" falls within "George does not show up" is very high. — Srap Tasmaner

The probability space here is the set of possible outcomes we've thus far observed and, under the assumption that the distribution over that probability space has not changed -- George hasn't converted to the church of punctuality, giving us a reason to believe the probability space has changed -- the good bet is he'll show up late.

EDIT:

Wrapping that back to the OP, now...

A -> ~A
A
Therefore ~A

The (probability) space of A is entirely contained within the (probability) space of not-A.


Well, of course it is. That's almost a restatement of the probability of P v ~P equals 1.


Not sure where I'm going with this, just thinking out loud more than anything.

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs103/tools/truth-table-tool/

Thanks :).



This is a meaty post.

Almost too much for me :D -- one thing that's interesting is your reduction of material implication to set theory. I'm not sure how to understand that, really -- if the moon is made of green cheese then 2 + 2 = 4. That's the paradox, and we have to accept that the implication is true. How is it that the empirical falsehood, which seems to rely upon probablity rather than deductive inference, is contained in "2 + 2 = 4"?

I'm intentionally throwing wrenches/spanners here so kindly tell me to 'ef off if it's uninteresting or simply misinformed. I'm starting to feel the tread in this conversation where I'm in too deep over my head.

I remember enjoying it -- it's something of a lament and criticism of disenchantment as the one true knowledge. The plant studies stuck with me as an interesting bit because it seemed like such an easy thing to test, empirically, so you didn't even need to care if the idea was silly -- it got along with my general attitude of anarchy towards scientific knowledge.

When I say A sarcastically, I mean ~A, of course. And that is equivalent with A -> ~A. But I don't present it like that at all. I just say A and there is an implicit premise that when I say it, I mean its negation. I don't know how even modal logic could capture that. Or maybe, I am saying that A is true in an alternative world and false in the actual world, but even that seems far-flung.

Getting back to Srap Tasmaner, he's looking for a use of A -> ~A in everyday discourse. I don't think your proposal works, since people don't acutually say things of the form A -> ~A to convey sarcasm. It seems to me that you followed an interesting idea, but it doesn't do the job here. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Fair enough. I agree it doesn't fit the form -- people don't actually say the implication, it's only equivalent to the implication (but so are so many other formulas...).

True. The one time he did we all know it's because his wife grilled him the night before and he felt guilty but ever since the divorce it's been same old George: He only opens when he feels worried and ever since the divorce the man is never worried!

:D

This seems the easier approach to making sense of A -> ~A in a commonsense setting.

You mean substitute "George will open the store" with "If George will open the store then George will not open the store"?

Why make that substitution? I don't see how that is what the ironic speaker is saying. — Moliere

I can give you a story that comes to mind in which I'd assert something like that -- say I'm commiserating with a coworkers frustration about George not being as reliable as we'd like, even though he's a good enough fellow.

The substitution is there only because the OP starts with A -> ~A and asks for validity, so substitution seems to work as a model for the sarcastic talking. I agree that the person speaking sarcastically does not in any way mean these logical implications, though -- it's only an interpretation of everyday speech to try and give some sense to the original question that's not purely formal.

What is the conditional? — TonesInDeepFreeze

A = "George is going to open the store tomorrow"

So, by substitution:

George is going to open the store tomorrow implies George is not going to open the store tomorrow.

If it turns out, extensionally at least, that George opens the store tomorrow then the implication is false -- and I don't think that sarcasm means to invoke material implication, but this seems an example of everyday communication which material implication seems to capture. George opens the store tomorrow, so tho I state one and believe another it turns out that my belief is false and the assertion true (attempting to use your intensional definition here) -- so the implication turns out to be false. I'm thinking more baby logic here:

A -> ~A

Put it in a truth table and if A is true then the implication is false.

I like the idea of an irony operator :D

What I want is an example where this conditional is actually false, but is relied upon as a sneaky way of just asserting ~A. — Srap Tasmaner

A thought I have is sarcasm, but in the context of asserting a falsehood mistakenly.

So I can sarcastically say "George is going to open the store tomorrow" to mean that George is usually late and we are the ones who open the store on the regular. But if George opens the store tomorrow then the conditional was false because I asserted A to imply not-A, but in fact A is true so the conditional is false.

I haven't seen anyone define any of the positions in a clear and non-vacuous way, much less go on to argue in favor of one or another. — Leontiskos

If dialethism is true then pluralism is true.
Dialethism is true as it resolves the liar's paradox in a clear, non-vacuous way.
Therefore, pluralism is true.

Of course LNC and LEM are different. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Heh. Well, I'd expect that from you :D -- I'm not sure that the differences between them are at the level of "of course" for the participants here.

I can't find the post about the liar paradox; my own point was merely the technical one that the contradiction of the liar does not require LEM.

I agree. I don't think the liar's needs anything technical at all. For thems who prefer utterances we can frame it in plain language as "I am telling a falsehood right now"

Implications of this theory are far-reaching. It suggests that intelligent species, faced with existential threats, will inevitably develop coping mechanisms. — ContextThinker

I want to attack the notion that this idea is an evolutionary adaptation.

All species develop coping mechanisms, from viruses to us. Some of the species die in the process of natural selection and thems who chose the environmentally-conditioned adaptations which effect reproduction positively for the species are thems who developed the coping mechanisms that passed on.

But evolution has nothing to do with religion, in my opinion. Once we acquired the ability to speak language -- well, I think that's more in the ballpark of why religion exists. But it's pretty hazy since it's not like any of us were there at the dawn of talking/writing.

:rofl:

I don't recall the post, but in this thread (or another?) someone mentioned LEM in relation to the liar paradox. We don't need to refer to LEM for the liar's paradox. The contradiction is obtained even without LEM. — TonesInDeepFreeze

While others may have done so, in this thread that's been me aping Priest.

The idea is to point out a difference between LNC and LEM, as well as to prove that the dialeithic dialethic answer to the liar's is still valid in the sense of using some classical logical laws.

I think thinking in terms of "laws" is probably unhelpful here and I have never seen a monist argument that tries to define itself in this way. If by laws we mean "true for all existing logics," then there are clearly no such laws. The monist doesn't argue that such laws "hold in generality," except insofar as they hold for "correct logic" (as they variously define it; note also that most monists embrace many logics, the question is more about consequence). So, Russell's paper is fine overall, but I think this part has just confused people because it's easy to read it in a way that seems to make the answer trivial. But based on the fact that even pluralists themselves very often claim that they are in the minority, it should give us pause if monism seems very obviously false. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm fine with another rendition other than "laws" -- that's just usually the word that comes up. I don't think they are literal laws though, not even in the "laws of nature" sense.

I ought say that I don't think monism is obviously false. I'd say monism is kind of the "default" position when we start logic, if there is a default position at all -- strictly speaking it seems to me that monism/pluralism/nihilism are more philosophies about logic than logic proper. It seems when we're doing strictly logic it wouldn't matter for the purposes of pursing the logic whether there are one or many logics (or consequence relations, as you put it). But the impression that logic gives with its generality seems to indicate there would not be another set of logical rules that lead to different consequences -- that would violate the law of non-contradiction.

I'm thinking this (very consistent!) holding onto the LNC is a part of why these developments have taken so long to be achieved.

I think part of the confusion is that, just as idealism is much more popular on TPF than in metaphysics as a discipline, highly deflationary conceptions of logic's subject matter are also much more common. But one might agree to a deflation of truth for the purposes of doing logic without embracing any robust notion of deflation, e.g. that "on 9/11 the Pentagon was struck by an airliner not a cruise missile," is true or false in a sense transcending any formal construct or social practice. Maybe not, I only know of two surveys on this question, but they do seem to bear this out, as does the way authors actually talk about non-classical logics (i.e. they spend a lot of time making plausibility arguments, which are superfluous of logic is just about formalism). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Oh, certainly*. For my part I think the metaphysics of truth ought to be set to the side for purposes of the question -- I'd say if our metaphysics of truth can't accommodate our logic then it's our metaphysics that are in error. Hence the motivation to develop a logic sans-metaphysics, insofar that it's possible. It seems to me that acknowledging the implications of a logic without commitment is about as close as we can get there. I agree with the part of your quote here:

*EDIT: Certainly, the positions on TPF are a niche that's not representative of the academic community. And though I respect and even rely upon the academy I'm pretty sure my philosophical sympathies are not exactly academic.

Ontologically, the pluralist is going to be the one who thinks that objective/external reality is chaotic or random enough to support all sorts of anomalies and fluxes with respect to the relations between its constituent facts. (Logical nihilism, or rather logical asemanticism, seems more accurate in this context, though, if it is not accurate to think that reality is structured according to any completely specifiable system of logic at all. Or maybe there are a few rules that are universal as such, i.e. exactly those pertaining to universal quantification, if this be doable in an unrestricted way.)

I've mentioned the absurd as my metaphysical stance to kind of hint at why this is interesting to me -- I take the absurd as something of a starting point now-a-days. Reality at least seems chaotic and random enough to support a multiplicity of necessities that disagree.

So, no, my stance is not metaphysically innocent at all. In some ways Priest was appealing because he laid out a more coherent way of talking about these absurdities that seem real but are difficult to put into philosophical words.

I'm very much avoiding basing logic on either science or natural language reasoning even though I think natural language reasoning -- or informal reasoning -- is the origin of formal logic.

It seems to me logic is a bit like math (while not being reducible to math) in the way that it can be developed or "discovered".

My background epistemology of "guess and check", very much inspired by my understanding of science, definitely feeds into my motivation for a pluralistic philosophy of logic -- but I'm trying to avoid claiming either the mantle of science or the common sense of natural language reasoning in making my point. Which is probably why it falls flat.

If pluralism denied that there were any correct logics, how would it be distinguishable from nihilism exactly? — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's a question I ought take up, given I'm defending pluralism and poo-poo-ing the idea of correct logics, at all.

Nihilism states there's no logical laws. Pluralism states there are more than no logical laws, and more than one logical law. Though "law", by the pluralist, is funny here. My thought is that "law" is stipulative -- my suspicion being that all arguments for a logic must beg the question the only way to evaluate a logic is to develop and utilize it in some fashion.

I'm thinking that the monist thinks there is, at the end of the day (ultimately?), only one set of logical laws that cohere together. The pluralist can accept laws insofar that they are limited in a non-lawlike(logical inference rule that fits within the logic) fashion. The nihilist states that all logical so-called laws are matters of preference -- something like a poetry of rhyme, but with ideas.

There's a memoir I read which talked about the effects of music on plants that I wish I remembered the name of. It wasn't the only thing in the memoir -- I remember he visited a person who believed they could talk with whales, but not much else -- but I wish I could remember the author or name of that book.

EDIT: Typing it out helped me remember: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/319/the-spell-of-the-sensuous-by-david-abram/

Though not to be rude I'm still looking for good points of response @Count Timothy von Icarus, but rather in bits to see if we can stall the sprawl a bit.

Well, that's a fine argument to have. But it gets to the point I tried to make to Banno and fdrake that one cannot retreat into formalism and ignore discussions of truth on this topic. If it would be question begging to assume that logic is about truth-preservation then it would be equally question begging to say that truth depends on / is defined by normative or formal contexts. If the latter is accepted, then of course nihilism is true (or rather true relative to some contexts and false relative to others, depending on our normative games.) — Count Timothy von Icarus

One thing I'm guessing is that arguments for any logic, due to the generality of the topic, will by their very nature always beg the question -- otherwise the logic wouldn't be consistent with itself! And that's a terrible place for a candidate logic to be.

The point from there would simply be to demonstrate more than one logic -- one which results in a "F", where the other results in a "T" or there's perhaps another value other than "F" or "T". The trick is in being able to evaluate the logic without the logic. How can it be done? I think that's the puzzle, in a nutshell.