In other words you agree that NATO was not and is not prepared for the kind of war Ukraine is fighting and so unable to supply Ukraine to fight said war it's not prepared for. — boethius

Which sounds kind of suprising given that NATO has been so rightly perceived as a growing unbearable threat against Russia at least since 2008, right?

neomac, in addition to Sergei Poletaev, Putin, Slutsky, Medvedev, Aksyonov, Zakharova, Gurulyov, Zhuravlyov, Zatulin, and some others, have spoken of demilitarization of Ukraine (not just a fifth thereof). Similarly, whoever has spoken of deNazification of Ukraine, change or control of Ukrainian government / Kyiv, and whoever has gone further. (Kremlin-approved officials.) Also Mordvichev. — jorndoe

Sure. In this case I was also interested in reporting the views of a sober pro-Russian Russian geopolitical analyst on the current situation (others in the same site maintain that nuclear bombing a NATO country like Poland would be the necessary evil to win this war, go figure).

So if Russia will require demilitarization of Ukraine (a radical reduction of its army), neutral status for Kiev (and a mechanism to control it) and the recognition of some form of territorial changes, to end this war with Ukraine, then Ukraine must make such "uncomfortable but necessary concessions" to end "this senseless waste of human life". Right? — neomac


I get you're really desperate to frame me as being 'pro-Russian', but perhaps you can tone it down a little. — Tzeentch

Not as much desperate as you are to repeatedly frame your opponents as being addicted to "deadly drug" or “hopium” of Western propaganda. Besides there is nothing I’ve said to tone down, even a little. Indeed I still find the expression "pro-Russian" as a non-hyperbolic and most certainly accurate qualification of your views. The problem is not the words chosen it’s their meaning and implications. If I say: "Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all others", this would sound pro-democracy, wouldn’t it? Yes it would and rightly so. That is, it doesn't matter how badly you talk about Russia, but how badly you talk about it relative to their alternatives like NATO or the US, especially if it is matter to decide the political fate of the countries involved in this war and which will impact our present and future lives. You are pro-Russian as far as I’m concerned beyond any reasonable doubt and I don’t need your confirmation to that, I’m just soliciting you (and your sidekicks) to provide arguments to ground your moral and geopolitical positions as applied to this war instead of hiding behind your pointless sarcasm and framing your opponents as NATO cheerleaders. As far as I’ve read, you didn't bring arguments that the actual Russian propaganda supporting the war against Ukraine didn't make (so exactly zero of your arguments proves that you care about Ukrainian lives more than they themselves do), nor brought any arguments to support more likely effective policies of constraining Russian imperial ambitions alternative to what the Westerners are supporting because likely you do not see Russia as a geopolitical threat, certainly not as the US, since the US is the great Satan, right? So let me tone it up a little more: you are even more pro-Russian than certain pro-Russian Russian analysts, as I’ve pointed out earlier.

That often requires uncomfortable but necessary concessions from both sides. — Tzeentch


Note the keyword. I even underlined it for you. — Tzeentch

And then I'm the disingenuous one?! By underlining this twice pointless keyword which seemingly has a flavor of neutrality, in reality you are underlining how hypocritical and flawed your claims are. So, by all means, thanks a lot for underlining it for me.
As far as I can tell, everybody shared understanding here is that a negotiation “often requires uncomfortable but necessary concessions from both sides” in order to succeed and that negotiation is a plausible and welcomed way to end this war. So your dodgy answer is apparently nothing more than a platitude which nobody disagrees with. The rhetoric purpose of this platitude however is to hide all what is really controversial about your beliefs and therefore would be more pertinent to bring up in answering my question. What is controversial is under what conditions could and would be desirable this negotiation to happen, in particular concerning the Ukrainian negotiation power toward Russian claimed requirements (which I gave you an example of). This negotiation power could be weaker or stronger depending on a load of evolving circumstances, many of which might be hidden to us. However before, during and after the beginning of the war until now you and your sidekicks were fine with having Ukraine agree on Russian requirements by withdrawing the Western military support (which the Ukrainians have asked for and the Westerners were willing to provide according to Western national interest), without bothering with Ukrainian negotiation power and related circumstances to preserve self-determination, not surprisingly so because you even overlook Ukrainian agency at your convenience. The West should appease the Russians (their sense of security, their geopolitical projections, the Black Sea fleet, not bother them in their “back yard”, repay for the broken promise of “not one inch further East”, thwart the nuclear threat, etc.), so as your guru Mearsheimer suggests Ukraine should accept to remain under the influence of Russia. If this isn’t pro-Russian I don’t know what is.
Second, there are deeper flaws in your and your sidekicks’ views though. You and your sidekicks often accuse [1] your opponents of something like “not only is no theory of victory ever presented (for example how to deal with the lack of air power) but even simple questions such as how many lives lost would be worth the territory back if it was feasible likewise proponents of Ukraine policy can't answer” and something like “No actual sense to the project need be presented by Ukraine nor anyone else. Ukraine wants to fight!”. These arguments are grounded on alleged rational requirements (like a theory of victory or a victory assessment in terms of human life costs) or meant to discredit alleged Western excuses behind Ukrainian’s choices (like “Ukraine wants to fight”) for an exploitative and manipulative behaviour by the West at the expense of the Ukrainians. Both assumptions are not only questionable on their own merits (as I argued in the past on several occasions with little or no feedback) but can very easily be retorted against your own views in the same fashion. Indeed, you too do not have a “theory of peace” and instead pretend to rely on Ukrainian choice (all of a sudden Ukraine has regained its agency back like in “Ukraine found an agreement with Russia in April ’22!”) to determine “the uncomfortable but necessary concessions” the Ukrainians would freely choose ONLY AFTER the Western choice to not support them anyways. And this ALWAYS for exploitative and manipulative reasons, given your US-phobia or aversion to the “Great Satan” (just emulating your penchant for cheap discrediting expressions which you never felt like toning down), this would be a blow in the face of the American imperialism. Besides you too have nowhere presented how much loss of freedom, well being or security would be worth for the Ukrainians not to fight back the Russians.
Third, to me “being neutral” means that either you are indifferent to how the war evolves and to who is right or wrong in this war. Or it means that you place exactly equal responsibility on fighting parties and/or promote policies that maintain good economic/political relationships with both or with neither involved parties (assumed they would allow it). But you are not indifferent to how the war evolves and to who is right or wrong. Nor you and your sidekicks have ever given arguments supporting an equal attitude toward belligerents or involved third parties, indeed you put the greatest blame on the US and advocate opposition to the the current American leadership in this war while keeping totally silent about Russia. Now, given that you and your sidekicks can not claim impartiality by any means, as far as I am concerned what remains to be rationally investigated is your approach in picking sides. One of my core assumptions is that it would be more rational to start with the simple question “what do you prefer for you and people you really care about between living like an avg Westerner or an avg Russian, Chinese, Iranian?” instead of “what can you do to save the entire present and future humanity materially, psychologically and morally from war, starvation, diseases, exploitation, manipulation?”. And you know why “more rational”? Because I have no reasonable doubt that I and you too (or anybody else in this thread for that matter) have a clue on how to answer the first but absolutely no fucking clue about answering the second (I even doubt it makes sense). Whatever answer I give to that core question will guide my siding with the international circumstances (given my very limited but hopefully rational enough understanding of them) which would be more likely benign toward my preferences.



[1]

However, not only is no theory of victory ever presented (for example how to deal with the lack of air power) but even simple questions such as how many lives lost would be worth the territory back if it was feasible likewise proponents of Ukraine policy can't answer.
That it is simply Ukraine's choice is the answer and we must just take it for granted that Zelensky speaks for all Ukrainians. But who doesn't have a choice is Westerners supplying weapons. No actual sense to the project need be presented by Ukraine nor anyone else. Ukraine wants to fight! — boethius

I would worry about ending this senseless waste of human life as soon as possible, and steer towards a stable peace. That often requires uncomfortable but necessary concessions from both sides. — Tzeentch

So if Russia will require demilitarization of Ukraine (a radical reduction of its army), neutral status for Kiev (and a mechanism to control it) and the recognition of some form of territorial changes, to end this war with Ukraine, then Ukraine must make such "uncomfortable but necessary concessions" to end "this senseless waste of human life". Right?

it's very disingenuous how our position is repeatedly framed as being 'pro-Russian' — Tzeentch

Earlier I cited a pro-Russian Russian analyst claiming: The conception of our victory is clear: We still need the demilitarization of Ukraine (a radical reduction of its army), neutral status for Kiev (and a mechanism to control it) and the recognition of some form of territorial changes. (https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/articles/counteroffensive-is-failing/). Now would it be perfectly fine with you for whatever reason to let Russia win according to that definition of Russian victory?

I'll say that by far the most influential book, 'eye-opening' if you will, I've read on the matter is Unrestricted Warfare (1999), written by two Chinese colonels. — Tzeentch

ok thanks, I'll have a look into it.

I also had the opportunity to follow courses on propaganda (euphemistically called 'information warfare') - very eye-opening. — Tzeentch

What are the textbooks in which you studied it?

Right, so there's no plan. Just vacuous rhetoric with no sense of the human cost, which this offensive was a shining example of. This we already knew. — Tzeentch

Yours is just vacuous rhetoric with no sense of human affairs. One can devise a plan and then revise it.
There can be plans A B C D... Z and beyond. If there are plans, effectively made by political or military agents, it will be rational to not divulge them in public and to expect they won't be divulged. One can at best guess and, laymen or uninformed experts, can be wrong.
It's not just the military point that is going to be relevant for our moral siding. Nor the Western propaganda, a good part of which is pro-Russian, like yours. The sense of human cost doesn't need to be assessed in military terms nor in terms of just human lives. You keep reasoning within the bubble of your non-shared assumptions. Even pro-Russian Russian analysts get the stakes MORE OBJECTIVELY than you ever could:
On the home front
Since the military conflict in Ukraine is not an all out war, the loser will not be the side who physically runs out of strength, but rather the one who loses the will to fight sooner. What is important here is a clear vision of victory and a clear strategy for achieving it.
Russia initially had problems with this: The start came as a shock to everyone and just as suddenly turned into a protracted military conflict with a series of humiliating defeats.
Russian society was able to withstand the blow last year and – albeit not immediately, only towards the end of the year – pulled itself together and prepared for a long and hard struggle. The conception of our victory is clear: We still need the demilitarization of Ukraine (a radical reduction of its army), neutral status for Kiev (and a mechanism to control it) and the recognition of some form of territorial changes. The latter, by the way, will be the most difficult legally; here – for the sake of international legitimacy – Jesuitical forms such as a 99-year lease are possible. But we are getting ahead of ourselves, on this point.
Although this concept of victory has not been articulated, it is intuitively clear; the actions of the authorities at all levels do not contradict it; and society, although not very happy (only people who are not completely healthy enjoy armed conflicts), has rallied and is ready, if not to participate directly, then to support or at least tolerate it. All this will sooner or later produce results at the front – if the enemy does not respond with the same unity.
https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/articles/counteroffensive-is-failing/

Define what 'Ukraine winning' looks like — Tzeentch

At least, not making Russia win according to the Russian definition of "victory".

"Ukraine’s special services ‘likely’ behind strikes on Wagner-backed forces in Sudan, a Ukrainian military source says" :chin:
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/19/africa/ukraine-military-sudan-wagner-cmd-intl/index.html

Bad news for Ukrainians: A Pole about the tragic situation in Ukraine. "They have no one to fight"
https://wiadomosci-wp-pl.translate.goog/polak-opowiada-o-tragicznej-sytuacji-w-ukrainie-sprzet-pali-sie-jak-zapalki-6934373478947744a?fbclid=IwAR1kBtdnbSMDJYGyVLIESmpNI-gWWULbaswF8mBry2vXIdRP5PA51teQyc8&_x_tr_sl=pl&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=fr&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Putin ain't gonna like it:

"Joint US-Armenia military exercise to be held in Armenia on September 11-20 " - https://tass.com/world/1670475

"Armenian PM says depending solely on Russia for security was 'strategic mistake'"
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/armenian-pm-says-depending-solely-russia-security-was-strategic-mistake-2023-09-03/

More "deadly drug" from pro-Western-hyper-neo-pluto-crypto-capitalist-colonialist-warmonger-satanist-LGBTQ-freemason-nazi-zionist-mic-bigpharma-&-what-about-Vietnam-Iraq-Afghanistan-Syria-?-pizzagaters: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/02/everything-is-ahead-of-us-ukraine-breaks-russias-first-line-of-defence-in-stronghold

Oh it tastes sooo good. I'm sooo badly addicted to it.

I was dipping back into the Routledge handbook of metaphysics and it made me think of something. For folks who don't like thinking of logic in terms of naturalism, or logic as "out there," "in the world, sans mind," do you embrace realism towards propositions, states of affairs, facts, and events? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It seems you are suggesting 3 alternatives: naturalism, platonism, or nominalism. But I don't think these alternatives are the only ones available. I think that Wittgenstein offered a distinctive philosophical approach which is reducible to none of such alternatives.

I suppose a thoroughgoing nominalism that takes logic to be solely a property of mind doesn't have this problem. But to my mind such ontological commitments seem to threaten a fall into radical skepticism and solipsism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Then the link between nominalism and radical skepticism or solipsism should worry naturalists too. Quine was both naturalist and nominalist. Wilfrid Sellars too.

So, on the one hand I see a bridge between all three "types" of logic laid out in the initial definitions that comes from naturalism. Humans are natural systems and our minds formed by nature and our systems are formed by our minds. Thus there seems to be a way in which our minds and representational systems should map to things present in the world and be shaped by any patterns therein. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Take a deduction like Premise1: "If Trump won the 59th presidential elections, the earth is flat", Premise2: "Trump won the 59th presidential elections", Conclusion: "the earth is flat", how do you figure such mapping?

Merkel dared to push back against the Americans, knowing what would happen if they allowed the US to play Risk in the European backyard. — Tzeentch

And yet: In an interview published in Germany's Zeit magazine on Wednesday, former German chancellor Angela Merkel said that the Minsk agreements had been an attempt to "give Ukraine time" to build up its defences.
https://www.reuters.com/world/putin-russia-may-have-make-ukraine-deal-one-day-partners-cheated-past-2022-12-09/

↪neomac
Ironically, the post-Cold War plans for NATO and Ukraine were made not long after Vidal made that statement. — Tzeentch

Yeah until someone again pointed at the actual signs of NATO falling apart:
Emmanuel Macron warns Europe: NATO is becoming brain-dead
https://www.economist.com/europe/2019/11/07/emmanuel-macron-warns-europe-nato-is-becoming-brain-dead
But I guess you know better.

Meanwhile, the 21st century's real and only empire, the American empire, is showing actual signs of falling apart. — Tzeentch

Interesting, never heard that before.

January 11, 1986

Requiem for the American Empire
“Empires are restless organisms. They must constantly renew themselves; should an empire start leaking energy, it will die.”
Gore Vidal

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/requiem-american-empire/

When I was the only one who had brought up or defended the idea of truth-preservation in the entire thread? — Leontiskos

You weren't the only one to bring this up:

Logic rules allow us to infer some conclusions from some premises. Such rules ensure that if the premises are true, then the conclusion is true. — neomac

Let's apply your reasoning to mortuary. "A mortician is concerned with preserving bodies. Therefore a mortician builds/creates bodies. Q.E.D." — Leontiskos

"Built-in" is a figure of speech. We are talking semantics. Let's apply MY reasoning to mortuary "A mortician is concerned with preserving bodies so the notion of 'body' is semantically built in the notion of 'mortician'".

This just isn't right. It is not true that, "[T]he notion of 'truth' is built in the 'logic' rules themselves, in other words the meaning of 'truth' is determined by 'logic rules' too" (↪neomac
).

The notion of truth is not semantically built in the idea of correct inference. Truth is something beyond inference and beyond validity. Validity can be formally defined, but truth cannot be formally defined. Of course we can talk about "truth" qua some logical system, but this is technically an equivocation. This sort of "truth" is different from actual truth, and we do not hesitate to call it false in certain instances. — Leontiskos

Apparently you disagree with yourself. Indeed you yourself wrote “Currently our central criterion is validity, where the truth of the premises ensures the truth of the conclusions” so you determined the meaning of “valid inference” by explicitly referring to the notion of truth. If a valid inference must be truth-preserving then the notion of truth is built in that of valid inference. Q.E.D.

If something is meant to preserve another thing, then it is not building or creating that thing. — Leontiskos

"Built-in" is a figure of speech, we are talking semantics. So the point is that the notion of truth is semantically built in the idea of correct inference. This holds even if we occasionally fail to process the inference or if the inference is simply valid but not sound.

Trouble is, truth does not enter into formal systems until they are given an interpretation. — Banno

Notice that the opening post takes "formalisation" to be but one approach to answer the question of "what is logic?" so we are not just talking about logic in formal systems or just formal systems.
I can get that "formal systems" do not all make explicit use of the notion of truth and false (e.g. algebra). But my claim is more radical than it appears. Indeed, I take the notion of "truth" to be so primitive and pervasive along with the notion of "logic" that I take the concept of "truth" to be built-in that of "logic" ALSO independently from ANY interpretation. Indeed, any rule-based manipulation of symbols would still have a correct or incorrect application and this necessarily equates (even if it may not be identical) to answering the question: "This application conforms to the rules, true or false?". Besides if the meaning of "logic" (classic and non-classic) is not stretched to the point of not being about propositions/sentences (in other words representations), then it is still linked to possible interpretations.

But there is no way for me to make sense of “true” as applied to “logic” since the notion of “truth” is built in the “logic” rules themselves, in other words the meaning of “truth” is determined by “logic rules” too. — neomac


On the other hand, I don't agree with this. Logic can be said to be true insofar as it does what it is supposed to do: aid us in reasoning well. Currently our central criterion is validity, where the truth of the premises ensures the truth of the conclusions. So if I take a logical system and I scrupulously follow the rules, beginning with true premises, but then arrive at false conclusions, the logical system is bad or false. It is false in the sense that it is not doing what it was meant to do (i.e. preserve truth). Truth is not built in logic; it transcends it. — Leontiskos

Notice that quote of mine was questioning the notion of “true logic” if applied to different logic systems or different sets of logic rules which are all supposed to “preserve truth“. On the other side if your claim is supposed to question my claim that “the notion of ‘truth’ is built in the ‘logic’ rules themselves”, then you are failing since your own notion of logical system as a set of truth preserving rules is also grounded on the notion of “truth”. That doesn’t compromise the distinction between valid and sound deduction, by any means.

I'm just trying to explain the bucket of answers to "what is logic," that I was trying to group together with point 1. — Count Timothy von Icarus

All right, I think I got it now. In my own words, your summary amounts to pointing at 3 ways of approaching the question “what is logic?”:
1. The formalist, which understands logic as a system of rules independently from any reference to mental processes or the world.
2. The psychologist (comprising behaviourist, cognitivist, neurologist views), which understands logic as an empirical description of “laws of thought”.
3. The realist, which understands logic as metaphysical description of meta-empirical principles.

Concerning the "Scandal of Deduction", even though I do not share your naturalist assumptions, my way out is somehow similar to yours. We do not have the full list of valid representations of the world in our mind simultanously. We process them progressively according to some logic/semantic rules. And we may also fail in doing it.


Gotcha. But then why do we only progress through these rules so quickly and why are some people much faster than others at doing so? Or why are digital computers so much quicker than any person? I'm curious how that can be answered without reference to the physical differences between people or people and machines. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Your questions about cognitive performance in processing logic inferences are empirical questions not conceptual ones. So they deserve an empirical answer as offered e.g. by cognitive sciences.
What is crucial to me here is the distinction between empirical and conceptual questions. Naturalist views tend to conflate them. The co-existence between two distinct domains (the empirical and the conceptual) is undigestible for naturalists. Naturalists are mostly reductionists or eliminativists (there are also the mysterianists though) about the mental.

The term “influence” may express an ontological notion of causality, but I find this notion problematic for certain reasons. On the other side, if we talk in terms of nomological regularities, surely I do believe that certain external facts (e.g. the light reaching our retina) correlate with visual experiences which then we have learned to classify in certain ways. That would be enough for me to talk about “influence” but at the place of ontological causal links, there are just nomological correlations plus a rule-based cognitive performance.


Yeah, I think that works for what I'm thinking of. I don't really like eliminative views on causation, e.g. Russell's "a complete description of the solar system includes no room for cause," but even accepting his view it seems like there are still relations of a sort between the world and beliefs. But this to me suggests that our perceived order corresponds to an order that exists outside of our perceiving it.

But is it logic by which physical states seem to orderly evolve into only other certain configurations of future physical states? I feel like a different word should be used because "logic" is more associated with definitions 1 and 2 I laid out. It is certainly very common in the natural sciences to read phrases like "because of the logic of thermodynamics...." etc., but it's obviously not a reference to thought in those cases. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The empirical method obliges scientists to check their theories against the facts, therefore the confidence one can scientifically grant to scientific theories remains conditional for any empirical theory no matter how successfully it looks in competition to other theories.
Anyways I too find the expression “because of the logic of thermodynamics” a bit confusing (e.g. “logic of thermodynamics” is not yet another a logic system distinct from “propositional logic”), however I find it harmless if it simply equates to claiming: “Given the premises of the theory we call ‘thermodynamics’, we can logically infer this and that”.

Since they are mostly primitive concepts they can not be questioned or explained away without ending up into some nonsense or implicitly reintroducing them.


I'm reading Terrance Deacon's "Incomplete Nature," right now and it makes the same sort of argument. I'm really enjoying it, and I think he has a point here.

But Deacon is also coming from a naturalist frame, so he has different ideas about where to go from there. He has what I thought at first glance was a good argument against nominalism and the idea that all our categories are products of mind "in here," as opposed to reflections "out there." Perhaps not directly relevant to what we're talking about, since he is focused on how universals can have causal efficacy, but somewhat related. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Unfortunately I didn’t read "Incomplete Nature". And I find that passage rather obscure, even in relation to what I said. From what I gathered around he seems to support a peculiar notion of causality that would allow to bridge the gap between mental phenomena and physical explanation, so I guess it might be an interesting reading.

The question remains: if Prigozhin, Utkin and other prominent wagnerites are dead, what is the future of the Wagner mercenaries considering their pro-Russian activities in Africa? Are they going to be absorbed/replaced?

Mutiny feint? Russian aircraft shot down feint? The mutineer then killed feint? :roll: — ssu

Not sure if they wanted us to believe he is dead but he isn't, or that he's only presumed dead but he is, or that he was supposed to be in Russia but in reality he is still in Africa or in Belarus, or neither, because he is in Ukraine. Dead or alive.
This reminds of a famous line from Shakespeare's Hamlet: "There are more feints in Russia, dude, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Neverending Russian feints:
https://www.euronews.com/2023/08/23/wagner-mercenary-chief-yevgeny-prigozhin-killed-in-plane-crash

If you say in the latter statement that there can be many formalisms mapping on the same rules, then formalism is distinct from rules. And surely, by formalism, you could mean to refer to the logic rules as you also stated. But were this the case the following claim of yours “1. Logic is a set of formal systems; it is defined by the formalism” would equate to “1. Logic is a set of logic rules; it is defined by the logic rules” which sounds, if not tautological yet, very little informative.


Sure, it's tautological. That was the position of Russell and the Vienna Circle. Moreover, by this view, all of mathematics is itself tautological. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Certain logic formulas are tautologies e.g. "( P ⇒ Q ) ⇔ ( ¬ P ∨ Q )" in the sense of being always true whatever is the truth value of the variables P and Q. However not all logic formulas are tautologies (e.g. P ⇒ Q). The idea that logic (and mathematics to the extent it is reducible to logic) is tautological basically comes from the idea that logic theorems can prove only tautological formulas. And this is in line with what I also said about deductive reasoning “from premises to conclusions we are manipulating our own representations so that, semantically speaking, there is no more truth in the conclusion than there is in the premises, there is no more information in the conclusion than there is in the premises.“
But your statement “Logic is a set of formal systems; it is defined by the formalism” (which is neither a logic formula nor a logic tautology) seemed to offer a definition for “Logic”. And valid definitions should not be tautological in the sense that what is to be defined should not occur in what is defining. Yet your other claims made your definition of “logic” look tautological (even claiming “Logic is all about tautologies” would sound tautological if it equates to “Logic is all about logic”).

The rules define what the system is. And per deflationary theories of truth, that tend to go along with this sort of view, truth is itself simply something defined in terms of such systems. That is, truth is "neither metaphysically substantive nor explanatory. For example, according to deflationary accounts, to say that ‘snow is white’ is true, or that it is true that snow is white, is in some sense strongly equivalent to saying simply that snow is white, and this, according to the deflationary approach, is all that can be said significantly about the truth of ‘snow is white.” — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’m not persuaded by the deflationary theories of truth so I can’t share your assumption. The most intuitive objection I can make against it is that, asserting p doesn’t mean nor implies that p is true.

the general idea is that logic is about abstract systems, not thought and certainly not the world or metaphysics.Logic might inform our metaphysics, but our metaphysics (or philosophy of mind) should not inform our consideration of logic. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Notice that “abstract” in “abstract systems” may also have a metaphysical connotation: namely, being out of space and time. And this understanding would lead us to a form of platonism about logic (which is also a metaphysical view). However “abstract” can simply refer to the result of a cognitive task by which we are focusing on certain set of characteristics or type of information while ignoring others. So “abstract systems“ refers to the possibile result of such cognitive task. I guess that’s the understanding suggested by your claim, right?

Independently from the merits of Tarski’s semantic theory of truth for formal systems, if the price for it is to relativize the notion of truth to a given (object) language, my problem with it is: what does “if and only if” in the T-condition mean? If the be-conditional requires the notion of “True” to be understood as a logic operator, but the notion of true can not be applied at the same language level in which the bi-conditional is expressed, then what does that bi-conditional even mean? Besides asserting p (in the most basic object language and since it’s a language it can offer just representations of facts not facts themselves) doesn’t mean that p is true.


Right. Or what does it mean to "describe things" at all in a language we are pretending is completely divorced from anything else in reality? At a certain point, when you get into very deflationary views, you're no longer describing "things." All you can say is that "a system can produce descriptions.” — Count Timothy von Icarus

Indeed, I’m not even sure that such views would even justify anybody saying “a system can produce descriptions”, since the notion of “description” to me conceptually implies the idea that representations of states of affairs are distinct from the states of affairs in the world as the former refers to the latter (not the other way around), and the idea that the former can correctly or incorrectly apply to the latter (hence the distinction between “true” and “false”).

But most philosophers are naturalists, so it doesn't seem too outlandish. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If you mean that this thread is specifically about naturalist views of logic, then I didn’t get it but I will take it into account from now on. On the other side, if you mean that this thread is about views on logic and your views on logic are grounded on popular naturalist assumptions, then I’ll confirm what I said that I do not share such popular views and I’m open to discussing them.

What you may be tempted to say instead is that if there are representational tools that can successfully represent the world, then the world must be such that our representational tools can succeed in representing it. But this claim does very much sound like claiming that we can represent the world that we can represent, doesn’t it?

It sounds similar; I don't think it's identical. First, if we posit that any intelligibility we find in the world is hallucinatory, something we project onto a world that lacks it, I don't see how this doesn't slide into the territory of radical skepticism. The steps to get us to "how do you know cause and effect exist? Maybe your mind creates all such relationships," seem like they should also get us to "why do you think other minds exist?" Or "why should we think an external world exists outside of our perceptions?" Afterall, don't we suppose that others have minds because of how those minds seem to effect their behaviors?

The fact that animism is pretty much universal in early human cultures (e.g., "the river floods because it wants to"), and that children tend to provide intentional explanations for natural phenomena ("the clouds came because the sky is sad") seems to show we can "hallucinate" other minds to some degree. But if we think all of the intelligibility we find in the world is simply projected, then I'm not sure how solipsism isn't a problem.

Most philosophers are naturalists though, and most think the natural sciences are one of the best sources of information we have about how the world is though. And if we accept we are formed by natural selection, then it is prima facie unreasonable to think how we "make the world intelligible" has nothing to do with how the world is.

Second, what is the point of positing aspects of reality that we cannot ever, even in principle, experience? To be sure, people have experiences all the time that they say they cannot put into words. That makes perfect sense; we do more than just use language. But aspects of reality we can never know? They are like Penrose's invisible fire breathing dragon who is flying around our heads and not interacting with anything. We can imagine an infinity of such entities. But as long as they are, in principle, forever unobservable, their being or not being seems identical. When we move to the existence of that which cannot even be thought it seems even weirder. It's the inverse of radical skepticism, instead of seeing a way to doubt everything, now we can posit anything (so long as we can never know of it). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’m not positing “that any intelligibility we find in the world is hallucinatory”, I’m not a radical skeptic, I’m not a solipsist. My point is more that we have a network of concepts (like representation, world, truth, fact, possible fact, logic/semantic inference) that enable us to talk meaningfully and reflectively about our own cognition. Since they are mostly primitive concepts they can not be questioned or explained away without ending up into some nonsense or implicitly reintroducing them. To me “realism” about the existence of the external world (that can be experienced or referred to by other minds beside mine) is matter of conditions to talk meaningfully about the external world, so any attempt to question the existence of the external world sounds nonsensical to me as much as any attempt to demonstrate it, because one needs demonstration were things can be questioned meaningfully.
On the other side, our representations of the world may not correspond to what is the case, and may refer to mind dependent facts (as human linguistic conventions or social institutions). Unfortunately we may hold more false beliefs than we are able to detect or wish to admit. And human representations and logic/semantic inferences may serve human biological extinction as much as they can serve human biological survival.

Logic rules allow us to infer some conclusions from some premises. Such rules ensure that if the premises are true, then the conclusion is true. And that’s possible because from premises to conclusions we are manipulating our own representations so that, semantically speaking, there is no more truth in the conclusion than there is in the premises, there is no more information in the conclusion than there is in the premises. The mapping to the world can be done by the premises. But logic would work even without any such mapping. E.g. Premise 1: squares are triangles; Premise 2: triangles are circles; Conclusion: squares are circles.


This gets to the "Scandal of Deduction." If in all valid deductive arguments all information in the conclusion is contained in the premises, what exactly is the point of deduction? It tells us nothing. So why does deduction seem so useful? Why can't we memorize Euclid's axioms and then immediately solve every relevant geometry problem we come across?

This is probably the best example I know of where thinking of logic as completely abstract runs into problems. A lot of ink has been spilled trying to figure out some sort of formal solution to the Scandal, because the idea is that any solution has to lie within the scope of the abstract systems themselves.

I don't think this works. Floridi and D'Agostino put a lot of work into their conception of virtual information, trying to figure out how it is that at least some inference rules introduce new information in an analysis. But it seems like such a project is doomed. As both they and Hintikka agree, Aristotelian syllogisms only deal with surface information, information explicit in the premises. The problem is that we can still find this type of analysis informative, just as we can not know the answers to very simple arithmetic problems until we pull out a pencil and start computing.

Naturalist approaches have no problem here. We don't see things and immediately know what they entail because thought is a complex process involving a ton of physical interactions, all of which occur over time-- simple as that. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Concerning the "Scandal of Deduction", even though I do not share your naturalist assumptions, my way out is somehow similar to yours. We do not have the full list of valid representations of the world in our mind simultanously. We process them progressively according to some logic/semantic rules. And we may also fail in doing it.

It’s not the world that satisfies such rules, but our representations of the world. While we can represent and logically process representations of state of affairs that do not map into reality and do not correspond to facts, are there real states of affairs that we can not represent ? But how can we answer such question without possibly representing such state of affairs? What are we picking with the notion “state of affairs“ for whatever goes beyond our means of representation (so including the notion of "state of affairs" itself)?


Not everything can be put into words. I'm not sure if it makes sense to posit things that can be known in any way though. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure we may be unable to describe many of our experiences to any arbitrary degree of detail. For example there are many varieties of “red” and yet we can refer to all of them simply as “red”. That’s not the point, the point is that in order to talk meaningfully about experiences we can’t put into words, we still need to apply correctly a sufficiently rich set of notions and make inferences accordingly: e.g. that the varieties of red are not varieties of grey, they are colors and not sounds, that they are phenomenal experiences and not subatomic particles, that one normally needs functioning eyes and not functioning ears to experience them, etc.

Anyhow, would you agree that the world has an influence on how we represent it? — Count Timothy von Icarus

The term “influence” may express an ontological notion of causality, but I find this notion problematic for certain reasons. On the other side, if we talk in terms of nomological regularities, surely I do believe that certain external facts (e.g. the light reaching our retina) correlate with visual experiences which then we have learned to classify in certain ways. That would be enough for me to talk about “influence” but at the place of ontological causal links, there are just nomological correlations plus a rule-based cognitive performance.

By formalism I mean "the rules" not merely their particular expression, or to borrow a term from information theory, the "encoding." There can be many formalisms that map on to the same rules — Count Timothy von Icarus

.

Your way of talking looks confusing to me. If you say in the latter statement that there can be many formalisms mapping on the same rules, then formalism is distinct from rules. And surely, by formalism, you could mean to refer to the logic rules as you also stated. But were this the case the following claim of yours “1. Logic is a set of formal systems; it is defined by the formalism” would equate to “1. Logic is a set of logic rules; it is defined by the logic rules” which sounds, if not tautological yet, very little informative.
To me it’s more clear to simply say that formalism is the symbolic codification of logic rules as opposed to the natural language codification of such rules. My substantial points here are that one thing is the subject of our representations (logic rules) another is our representations (formalised vs natural) and that formalisation would be a fix for natural language ambiguities. Wrt these points the observation that for exactly the same set of logic rules one can have many symbolic or natural language codifications is correct but marginal.

Good points, and we have the problem, per Tarski, of being able to define truth from within a system. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Independently from the merits of Tarski’s semantic theory of truth for formal systems, if the price for it is to relativize the notion of truth to a given (object) language, my problem with it is: what does “if and only if” in the T-condition mean? If the be-conditional requires the notion of “True” to be understood as a logic operator, but the notion of true can not be applied at the same language level in which the bi-conditional is expressed, then what does that bi-conditional even mean? Besides asserting p (in the most basic object language and since it’s a language it can offer just representations of facts not facts themselves) doesn’t mean that p is true.

But my understanding of the search for the "one true logic" was that the pioneers of post-Aristotelian logic were looking for something that would be both a rigorous system and which would reflect facts perfectly. From the 19th century view, where it looked like all the world would soon be explainable in a rigorous way, this makes sense. They hadn't run into undecidability, the entscheidungsproblem, incompleteness, undefinability, etc. yet. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I see your point. But I think it is relatively easy to realign it with what I said. Indeed the “rigorous system” condition can reflect the need to have a system that doesn’t suffer from the ambiguities which e.g. the natural language suffers from. And the “reflect facts perfectly” condition refers to the fact that a certain set of logic rules can serve science better than other conceivable set of logic rules, as much as a set of mathematical analysis rules can serve science better than other conceivable mathematical rules.

However, I feel like the response to the aforementioned list might have been to throw the baby out with the bath water, since we've now disembodied logic in a sort of neo-Platonism. This is my problem with "game" theories of language as well. Maybe I'm just too much of a close-minded naturalist, but I tend to think that rules exist out in the world, in minds that are natural themselves, and that the rules must thus have natural causes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

All I can say at this point is that if your naturalist assumptions play a role in your understanding of logic, then they deserve to be addressed as well.

Right, but generally in the sciences we think that if a formal system very closely (or ideally, perfectly) describes something in the world, and if it allows us to make good (or ideally, perfect) predictions, this is because the formalism corresponds to something in the world. We don't think our language is magic, that it is sorcery that causes the world to correspond to it (else why all the failed formalisms, right?). But we also don't think our systems can have no connection to the world, because then science isn't about the world at all, its about language and formalisms. Except it also seems to tie to our experiences and have huge pragmatic value, so that doesn't seem right.

Of course, we can justify the sciences on pragmatic grounds, but it feels worthwhile to ask "why is it pragmatically valuable?" Presumably, because our formalisms, e.g. Newton's laws, the Schrodinger equation, etc. correspond to external reality in some way. But then if logical rules correspond to reality, it seems reality has some rules. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Without directly joining the debate between idealists and realists, my point is that if we develop tools (formal systems) to better serve a purpose (to describe the world), then we shouldn’t be all that surprised if these tools serve that purpose. What you may be tempted to say instead is that if there are representational tools that can successfully represent the world, then the world must be such that our representational tools can succeed in representing it. But this claim does very much sound like claiming that we can represent the world that we can represent, doesn’t it?

Formalism helps us discriminate better different ways allowing us to meaningfully speak of things according to various sets of “logic” rules.


Right, but then the question is: why do some formalisms work for meaningfully speaking of things better than others? And why is it that breaking our inference rules, committing logical fallacies, computing incorrectly, etc. all cause our models to fail at predicting what we see in the world? If there is no mapping between the formalism and the world, then using inappropriate inferences, bungling our computations-- these shouldn't necessarily be a problem for predicting nature. They are just violations of a game we invented. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Logic rules allow us to infer some conclusions from some premises. Such rules ensure that if the premises are true, then the conclusion is true. And that’s possible because from premises to conclusions we are manipulating our own representations so that, semantically speaking, there is no more truth in the conclusion than there is in the premises, there is no more information in the conclusion than there is in the premises. The mapping to the world can be done by the premises. But logic would work even without any such mapping. E.g. Premise 1: squares are triangles; Premise 2: triangles are circles; Conclusion: squares are circles.

What does one mean by “being sufficiently rational”? To me, appeal to “rationality” is nothing other than an appeal to the set of rules thatmust be satisfied in order to make things intelligible to somebody. And this may certainly include logic rules, too.


If something needs to satisfy certain rules to be intelligible, and we think the world is intelligible (sort of a prerequisite of the scientific project), then doesn't that mean the world must, in at least many key respects, satisfy such rules too? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It’s not the world that satisfies such rules, but our representations of the world. While we can represent and logically process representations of state of affairs that do not map into reality and do not correspond to facts, are there real states of affairs that we can not represent ? But how can we answer such question without possibly representing such state of affairs? What are we picking with the notion “state of affairs“ for whatever goes beyond our means of representation (so including the notion of "state of affairs" itself)?

3. Logic refers to rules that make the world intelligible to us.


I'm most interested in this one. If this is the case, are there rules out in nature that shaped us such that we need said rules to make the world intelligible to us? That is, why would natural selection endow us with such a need if such rules only exist in our minds? This is what I find most puzzling and hard to wrap my mind around; it's hard to know what a satisfactory answer to the puzzle looks like.

I'd like to buy into pancomputationalist physics as much as I used to because that seems to explain things well, but the bloom is off the rose for me. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I guess that these questions are all the more pressing because of your naturalist assumptions which I’m afraid I do not share. My assumptions have been more shaped by a certain reading of Wittgenstein’s views, especially in his later phases, and according to such reading there are reasons to be skeptical about both platonism and naturalism.
Concerning your claims, let me list just the points I’m having problems with: 1. if by “rules out in nature” you are literally referring to the “laws of nature” then I find your usage conceptually confused, because the former concept is conceptually distinct and irreducible to the latter. And rules are not “in our minds” if this means a private phenomenon, something only a given subject can possibly have access to. I won’t elaborate further such claims now 2. If by “laws of nature” you are referring to some theory of natural selection then I’m not sure we have such a theory for logic rules. Notice that logic rules can be used to justify anti-natalism, human killing and suicide depending on the premises so both for human beings’ survival as much as for their extinction. Besides natural selection can be used to explain also failures to follow logic rules, think of our cognitive biases (and more radically, if you remember, even Nietzsche claimed that the notions causality, will, subject, substance are false representations of the world which we have to survive).
Anyways, as far as I’m concerned, a more Humean understanding of “laws of nature” plus some form of “emergentism” may help us make the coexistence of “laws of nature” and “rule following” less untreatable.

Crimea is important also for its underwater resources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/world/europe/in-taking-crimea-putin-gains-a-sea-of-fuel-reserves.html
https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2014/05/27/the-energy-dimensions-of-russias-annexation-of-crimea/index.html

To me, this is the best starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_questioning

But this brings up the question, "does the absence of a 'one true logic' necessitate deflating logic into formalism? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you didn't clarify much what you mean by "formalism". As a starter, I take "formalism" to be broadly speaking the symbolic codification of a set of logic rules. If there are one or many sets of logic rules, this is a distinct issue.
"Formalism" to me is required to standardize a given set of rules and remove ambiguities of ordinary language for certain syntactic terms (e.g. we can attributing different meanings to “to be“, “if…,then…”, “not”, “or” or “all” in logic).
Said that, I find the expression "one true logic" nonsensical. One may be willing to count "logic" by counting the number of "set of ‘logic’ rules" we want to distinguish (for example in geometry different set of postulates can different geometries the same can go for logic see e.g. non-classical logic). But there is no way for me to make sense of “true” as applied to “logic” since the notion of “truth” is built in the “logic” rules themselves, in other words the meaning of “truth” is determined by “logic rules” too. One might be tempted to see “logic rules” as a description of how things are, but that’s a categoric confusion to me: “logic rules“ are rules, not description of facts. To me.

Or can we meaningfully speak of things like the logic of cause? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Broadly speaking yes, if you mean by "logic of cause" the set of semantic rules that govern the notion of “cause”. However, more strictly speaking, "logic" refers to rules governing synthatic terms (like propositional operators, quantifiers, modal operators, etc.)

And if we can meaningfully speak of things, what is the relationship between the formalism and the referents? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Formalism helps us discriminate better different ways allowing us to meaningfully speak of things according to various sets of “logic” rules.

When we say: "you're acting illogically? "or "that doesn't follow logically," we often mean something different from: "you are not acting according to a formal system," or "I am not aware of any formal system where the inference you are making works." Rather, we tend to be criticizing someone for failing to think in a way that is sufficiently rational.. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What does one mean by “being sufficiently rational”? To me, appeal to “rationality” is nothing other than an appeal to the set of rules that must be satisfied in order to make things intelligible to somebody. And this may certainly include logic rules, too.

1. Logic is a set of formal systems; it is defined by the formalism.
2(a). Logic is a description of the ways we make good inferences and determine truth, or at least approximate truth pragmatically.
2.(b). Logic is a general description of the features or laws of thought. (This is more general than 2(a).
3. Logic is a principle at work in the world, its overall order. Stoic Logos, although perhaps disenchanted. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Following what I wrote, I disagree with all 3 responses to "what is logic?" partially or totally:
1. Logic is not defined by formalism. Formalism is a way to express a set of logic rules.
2. Logic is not a description of the ways we make good inference or laws of thought, if this is taken to be an empirical enterprise like a scientific theory.
3. Logic refers to rules that make the world intelligible to us.

Some thoughts: maybe the coup in Niger (after the coups in Mali and Burkina Faso), will make France less hesitant against the Russians now. So either hit back in Niger and try to take down the Wagnerites (maybe by drawing more of them from East Europe first), or contribute more in Ukraine? https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/18/russian-mercenaries-are-pushing-france-out-of-central-africa/

Then why propose the scenario of a freeze, so desired by Russia, instead of speeding up the supply of weapons? — Mykhailo Podolyak (Aug 15, 2023)

Here one major problem "Ukraine is burning through ammunition faster than the US and NATO can produce it": https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/17/politics/us-weapons-factories-ukraine-ammunition/index.html

Your inference here makes no sense syllogistically or syntactically; motivations is neither mentioned nor implied. Again, you are imposing your erroneous belief and acting like it is a correct inference.
— Jack Rogozhin

But I wasn’t making an inference of the kind you suggest. — neomac


Yes you were. — Jack Rogozhin

You should write “I thought you were making an inference” or “I still think you were making an inference”. Unfortunately you are wrong as a matter of fact and beyond any reasonable doubt.

The problem however is not necessarily on denying such facts but on questioning if such facts are enough to support the claim that the Revolution of Dignity was a coup as Russia and pro-Russian propaganda claims — neomac


I agree here and this is what we should be discussing — Jack Rogozhin

Too late for that, I think your own notions of “imperialism” and “legitimate threat” may likely be part of your main assumptions in discussing about the alleged coup, so I think you too should be focusing on such notions of yours even before talking about those facts. At this point, if you are not willing to clarify your own notions, then neither am I in discussing your understanding of those facts.

I claimed “Ukrainian ethnic Russians and Russophone are still Ukrainians and must abide by Ukrainians rules”, but that’s it. “No matter what” is your spurious addition. — neomac


Yes you did, and it's reprehensible...and I made no spurious addition and you haven't shown I have. — Jack Rogozhin

Yes I did, and I’ll do it again easy-peasy. You attributed to me “the notion citizens have to abide by their country's rules no matter what” while my original quote was “Ukrainian ethnic Russians and Russophone are still Ukrainians and must abide by Ukrainians rules.” (dot sign included). So there is no final “no matter what” in my original quote, you spuriously added it and then presented it as a factual report of what I said or meant. But you are factually wrong beyond any reasonable doubt. If you think you could infer it from my original quote, then your inference here makes no sense syllogistically or syntactically; “no matter what” is neither mentioned nor implied. If you thought you were making explicit what I left implicit, then you are still factually wrong beyond any reasonable doubt: indeed, what I left implicit at most is “if they do not want to pay the consequences” and not “no matter what“. Finally, and more importantly, I didn’t make a moral claim, but a political and legal one that holds for any state. So yes, you are factually wrong beyond any reasonable doubt no matter how you want to play it.
Oh, and if you don’t like to waste your time, then let me warn you that I don’t care about your emotional blackmailing.

First, if Russia didn’t spill violence and murder into Ukraine by supporting militarily the separatists FIRST, and so be a legitimate threat AGAINST Ukraine, its people and its territory (according to your own notion of “legitimate threat”), things wouldn’t as likely have reached such a scale to be a legitimate threat AGAINST Russia and its borders, assumed that’s the case. — neomac


This is an unfounded lie. What happened first is the US backed coup led to 50 Russian Ukrainians being burned alive in the Trade House and Donbass Russian Ukrainians rejecting the coup being shelled and terrorized by Azov Nazis. The fact you ignore that is also reprehensible. And calling it a "revolution of dignity" when it was a foreign-backed coup where citizens and police were executed by CIA-trained snipers is both erroneous and disgusting — Jack Rogozhin

Focus, I was talking about your notion of “legitimate threat” as it applies in the inter-ethnic conflict between Ukraine and Russia. And even if, for the sake of your argument, one was willing to concede that there was a “coup”, it remains the fact that it was widely welcomed by the dominant ethnic group in Ukraine as much the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea was widely welcomed by the dominant ethnic group in Crimea (which however is a minority in Ukraine). So much so that Ukrainians are asking support from the US against Russia, not from Russia against the US.


Dude, if it is of any consolation, you must know I take no particular pleasure in damaging your goofy self-promoting beliefs and claims. Actually it’s getting more and more boring. In any case, I’m here to entertain myself, not to tolerate your incontinent lack of self-confidence. I’m not your therapist and I have no pity for you.

Ssu’s implicit claim came after you solicited him and he clarified on what grounds he made his claims. At the first round, your response seemed to me something like: Putin did not commit imperialist acts, therefore Putin didn’t have imperialist motivations. Were this the case, then you too in the end were making an implicit knowledge claim on Putin’s motivations, just you took Putin’s acts as more relevant evidence than Putin’s words to assess imperialist motivations.
But then at a second round you wrote “I'm not addressing the motivations here; I'm addressing the act. Those are not the same things”, so you are addressing just “the act”. And you wrote “when Russia extends greatly beyond the Donbass and begins regularly taking resources from that area and its citizens, then I will consider it imperialism”, so what I understood so far is that you can assess Russian imperialism based on such acts, independently from whatever Putin’s declared motivations were. I take such acts to be broadly “non-speech acts” because such acts are not talking and writing. So yes you were grounding your claims on non-speech acts actually or hypothetically committed by Russia, while ssu was arguing based on what was written and said by Putin, so broadly Putin’s speech-acts, to legitimise what Putin did (invading and annexing Ukrainian territories). — neomac


This is all supposition, and you admit it is. You cannot make a logical claim based on "it seems" and "what I understood" and assert it as fact. That is not just analytically incorrect, it is syllogistcally so. You must provide factual premises to synthesize a factual claim..and you don't do that here. Also, you clearly don't know what "speech act" means. — Jack Rogozhin

The fact I’m stating is nothing other than my understanding of your views. As I repeated many times, I’m not sure to understand your claims, so I’m expressing how I understood what you said so far, and “it seems” and “I understood” are intentional warnings to signal that. You too keep misunderstanding what I (and others) say and render your own misrepresentations as a factual claim as you just did by attributing to me inference I didn’t make. Instead of repeating that I’m misrepresenting you, even though I’m literally quoting your claims, can you try to clarify better what you meant in those quotes?
Since you know, what does “speech act” mean in your own words? I’m eager to share your superior knowledge.

The point here is that your claims are implicit knowledge claims grounded on certain evidences relevant for your understanding of “imperialism” as much as ssu’s implicit knowledge claims are grounded on other evidences relevant for his understanding of “imperialism”. And as long as one just expresses one’s beliefs to illustrate one’s own implicit assumptions to an interlocutor who doesn’t necessarily share them there is nothing really challenging about it, one is simply talking past each other. — neomac


The one who needs to heed this admonishment is you, as you have been doing what you admonish against here this whole discussion, and you do it in the sentence right above. You make another false claim against me without supporting it in any way, which is not philosophical at all. Remember, what is asserted without proof or evidentiary support can be refuted without such — Jack Rogozhin

I still have no idea what you are talking about though. You keep accusing me of misrepresenting you, but adding no clarifications about the claims I allegedly misrepresented in order to rectify my misrepresentations, and keep avoiding to answer my questions directly. So I’ll cut with this pointless exchange over my alleged misrepresentations by asking you more directly: do you distinguish imperialist acts and imperialist motivations as you distinguish acts and motivations? Yes or no? If so, would this distinction imply that non-imperialist acts can have imperialist motivations and that imperialist acts can have no imperialist motivations?

The point is that if I misrepresented them, maybe it’s because I didn’t understand them and need to question your claims to understand them better, after all you do not seem to understand my claims either. — neomac


This is not an excuse for misrepresentation. You should only claim, particularly in a philosophical discussion, your interlocutor is doing or saying something if you actually think they are. If you are not, you should either say "I think you are doing/saying this" or "i think you are doing saying this, could you clarify if you are or are not.” Otherwise you are being unfair to your interlocutor and degrading the discussion — Jack Rogozhin

Well I don’t really see why reiterated expressions of “it seems”, “I understood” and “am I misinterpreting you?” can not do the same job as “I think you are doing/saying this”, but if that will make things more clear to you then I’ll give it a try. Glad that you got rid of your glib “you don't get to tell me how I make my arguments, just as I don't get to tell you how you make yours”.

All right, can you give me your definition of “selfishness” as a general characteristic that is not about motivations and psychologies? Because after a quick check on wikipedia — neomac


Yes: the quality or condition of being selfish...from Merrian-Webster. As I said, it's a characteristic
— Jack Rogozhin

Sure a psychological characteristic concerning people’s motivations. — neomac


Your inference here makes no sense syllogistically or syntactically; motivations is neither mentioned nor implied. Again, you are imposing your erroneous belief and acting like it is a correct inference. — Jack Rogozhin

But I wasn’t making an inference of the kind you suggest. I was simply making explicit what I thought and still think you are leaving implicit, based on ordinary semantics. Indeed, strictly speaking, the Merrian-Webster definition doesn’t mention nor implies that “selfishness” is a characteristic for that matter, the words used are “quality” and “condition”, not “characteristic”. But if you implicitly assume that English speaking people have enough semantic competence to understand that “quality” and “condition” equate to “characteristic” in that context, then I too can implicitly assume that English speaking people can have enough semantic competence to understand if “selfishness” is a psychological characteristic or non-psychological characteristic, if it’s about people’s motivations or it’s not about people’s motivations. Besides relying on the Merrian-Webster definition simply shifts the burden of the semantic clarification from “selfishness” to “being selfish”. So I’ll cut with this pointless exchange over my alleged misrepresentation by asking you more directly: is “selfishness” a psychological characteristic about people’s motivations to you? Yes or no? If yes then, “selfishness”, as a general characteristic of politicians, is still a claim about their psychology and motivations, as I said. If no, enlighten me what kind of characteristic is that?
Notice also that here you are not using “I think you are doing/saying this” (i.e. “I think your inference makes no sense…”) but actually presenting as a fact you misrepresentation of my claim as a “syllogistically or syntactically” inference.

First, yes it is controversial for one reason or the other, again you just recently joined the thread, and I’m not here to keep you up-to-date on what has been discussed in this thread. Just as an example, what you call “the Maidan coup” has sparked some controversy in this thread at least 7 months ago (https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/776025), use the search function. Also the alleged Ukrainian war crimes sparked some controversies in this thread. — neomac


It is controversial for those who deny the facts, such as the US sending CIA agents to Ukraine right before the coup, and Gloria Nuland and our ambassador to Ukraine discussing who should replace the deposed democratically-elected leader...as if they have substantial say. The fact Nuland recently visited Niger to sway events there shows she hasn't changed her spots — Jack Rogozhin

Well, then it’s controversial because it wouldn’t make much sense to me to claim that there is a controversy about facts for those who agree on the facts. I think what you are trying to say is that there is an overwhelming large consensus over certain facts (like CIA agents and Gloria Nuland). The problem however is not necessarily on denying such facts but on questioning if such facts are enough to support the claim that the Revolution of Dignity was a coup as Russia and pro-Russian propaganda claims (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity). But again, I’m not interested in restarting the debate about these facts as such. And as long as you keep accusing me to misrepresent you at every exchange for whatever reason (including irrelevant editing incidents), instead of clarifying better your views, I don’t feel encouraged to widen the debate over other subjects. My focus is on your claims about “imperialism” and ”legitimate threat”.

Second, I didn’t claim that “the notion citizens have to abide by their country's rules no matter what”. My claim wasn’t about moral assessments of laws and related citizens’ attitude, it was about what Russia can claim as a legitimate threat against Russia — neomac


Ukrainian ethnic Russians and Russophone are still Ukrainians and must abide by Ukrainians rules — neomac


You did claim this and you did not just say that about Russia...you said what you said above, proving me right. — Jack Rogozhin

I claimed “Ukrainian ethnic Russians and Russophone are still Ukrainians and must abide by Ukrainians rules”, but that’s it. “No matter what” is your spurious addition. And, I didn’t mean to make a moral claim either. To me “must” can legitimately express a rule-based injunction that can apply to maths, logic, juridical laws, morality, games, etc. (e.g. if you want to play chess, you must abide by chess rules), so with that statement I meant to make a legal and political claim: sovereign states (like Ukraine, Russia, the US, Switzerland, etc.) impose their rules over their citizens within their territories by using their coercive power, so citizens must abide by them if they do not want to pay the consequences. This holds for democratic and non-democratic regimes, moral and nor moral laws. And since we were talking about legitimate threats AGAINST Russia, my point was: can imposing rules to its own citizens by a sovereign state (Ukraine) be a legitimate threat against other sovereign states (Russia)?
BTW even here nowhere you are saying “I think you are doing/saying this”, but you keep asserting your misrepresentations of my views as a fact, proofs. And yet you admonish me to do otherwise with your views. I almost feel like complaining about this treatment. But my spider-senses tell me that you have a very good excuse or justification that makes you happy, right?

Even if Ukraine is repressing or oppressing a minority of its own citizens, that doesn’t seem to be a threat against Russia (so much so that Russia needed to distribute Russian passports into annexed territories to have a convenient pretext that Ukraine is threatening Russian citizens) — neomac


Actually it is a threat against Russia and their people as it is fomenting violence and murder right at their border, which can spill into their own territory. And it is being done against their own ethnic people who were citizens of their country only thirty years ago. If Mexico had annexed San Diego 30 years ago and started slaughtering the Americans within their new borders, the US certainly--and rightly--would militarily step in

And you must certainly disapprove of all of the US's military border crossings/bombings since WWII. I agree with you there. — Jack Rogozhin

First, if Russia didn’t spill violence and murder into Ukraine by supporting militarily the separatists FIRST, and so be a legitimate threat AGAINST Ukraine, its people and its territory (according to your own notion of “legitimate threat”), things wouldn’t as likely have reached such a scale to be a legitimate threat AGAINST Russia and its borders, assumed that’s the case. Indeed, what does it mean “it can spill into their own territory”? How could such violence and murder spill into the Russian territory and become a threat against Russian people and territory exactly? Let’s not forget that Russia has the largest stockpile of nuclear warheads in the world, that Ukrainian military couldn’t match in the past and still can hardly match the Russian war machine with the current Western support, and a quite effective repressive machine within its own territory against unwanted political movements or social unrest?
Second, I find the claim “And it is being done against their own ethnic people who were citizens of their country only thirty years ago.” quite problematic for several reasons:
1. thirty years ago they were citizens of the Soviet Union not of Russia,
2. if ethnic Russians are Ukrainian citizens they must abide by the Ukrainian rules in Ukraine as much as ethnic Ukrainians who are Russian citizens must abide by the Russian rules in Russia,
3. if ethnic Russians feel persecuted they can still flee Ukraine as much the Jews fled from Nazi Germany, being so close to the Russian border it shouldn’t have been that difficult, and since Russia was so keen on saving the ethnic Russians in Ukraine with all the land they have, they could have helped them with the same efficiency the Soviet Union deported Crimean Tatars from Crimea to relocate inside Russia as they have relocated Ukrainian children.
4. if protecting ethnicity was a reason for invading and annexing, how about all Ukrainian citizens of those annexed areas which weren’t ethnic Russians or just pro-Russia?
5. Russia itself is a multi-ethnic country and repressed the separatist movements in Chechnya supported by many ethnic Chechens, why can’t Ukraine do the same within its territory and its ethnic minorities?
6. There are Russian minorities also in other Russian neighboring countries, like in some Baltic States, if such minorities complain about prosecution and want to separate from the State that is hosting them, Russia should see it as a legitimate threat against Russia, and so again invade and annex those territories too, but if that’s the reasoning all neighboring countries with Russian minorities should see Russia as a legitimate threat against their security with all non-assimilated Russian minorities, right?
Certainly, I do understand that Russia is concerned about ethnic Russians around the world and can exercise diplomatic and coercive pressure to protect them, if they are threatened. But can this predicament be qualified as a legitimate threat AGAINST Russia? Or AGAINST Russia more than or with greater priority than a legitimate threat AGAINST Ukraine? And consequently justify invasion + annexation by Russia of Ukrainian territories?
Concerning your last remark, I “must certainly disapprove of all of the US's military border crossings/bombings since WWII”, if I shared enough of your assumptions. That's not my impression.

If China tortures, imprisons, and persecutes Chinese muslim Uyghurs that doesn’t count as a legitimate threat against muslim states either. Right? BTW Russia too oppresses minorities up until now (like the Crimean Tatars which were occupying Crimea way before the Russians) that doesn’t make it a legitimate threat against other states (other than Ukraine of course, since Crimean Tatars are Ukrainian citizens too within Ukrainian territories), or does it? — neomac


This is a terrible analogy. Firstly, this action against the Uygures is still in dispute; the UN admits they have no evidence of such a persecution. Secondly, the Uyghurs are not ethnically Russian and the posited persecution is neither at the Russian border or involving shellings at that border — Jack Rogozhin

Firstly, “disputed” as the claim that the Revolution of Dignity was a coup. Or that the Ukrainians committed a genocide in Donbas. Can you post a link with the UN admitting “they have no evidence of such a persecution”? Anyway the UN is not the only relevant source about the Uyghurs’ case. BTW the UN also condemned Russian aggression of Ukraine (https://press.un.org/en/2022/ga12407.doc.htm), this is not controversial either, or is it?
Secondly, I’m still trying to understand your notion of “legitimate threat“ (“a legitimate threat to the security of a nation and its borders, and the safety of its people, is a legimtiate threat”, and I’ll ignore that it would be a very bad definition, being evidently tautological), I think you are conceiving it as a geopolitical general principle not as a principle that just happens to be so narrow that it can practically apply only to the Russian state, people and borders. Indeed, there have been and are lots of proxy conflicts and inter-states and intra-states threats in the world (think of the conflicts in the Middle East between major powers like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, or the case of Islamic terrorism) which are grounded more and religion then ethnicity. So the analogy with Uyghurs case was a way to test how your notion of “legitimate threat“ works in other scenarios.
Anyways, since you now insist on ethnicity and borders, I'll reformulate the hypothetical case of the Uyghurs: the Uyghurs are Muslim, ethnically Turkic, living in the Xinjiang and confining with another Muslim and ethnically Turkic state, namely Kazakhstan, so if China is oppressing Uyghurs, would this be a legitimate threat against Kazakhstan (let’s forget that the Kazakh government wants to preserve good relations with China, it’s just a hypothesis), to the point that they would be justified to invade and annex Xinjiang, if they only could?
And if you still don’t like the Uyghurs analogy, how about the inter-ethnic conflicts on the border between Azerbaijan and Iran, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, Armenia and Azerbaijan? Which state’s acts are “a legitimate threat” against which state? Which state would your notion of “legitimate threat” justify territorial invasion and annexation from which state? In other words, let’s see if you can find a real case good enough analogy to illustrate how your notion of “legitimate threat” applies on other non-Russian related scenarios. Because if you can’t , well that’s a problem to me.
Besides, your second comment makes me wonder how narrow is your notion of “legitimate threat”: e.g. by “nation” and “its people” you mean “citizens” or “dominant ethnic group”? A threat against the safety of the people of a given state can be qualified as a “legitimate threat“ against the State no matter if such people are living within their State or somewhere else? For example, Ukrainians ethnically Jewish are suffering as well the horrible consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and fighting for that too (https://www.timesofisrael.com/ukrainian-jews-recount-stories-of-survival-endurance-escape-after-1-year-of-war/, https://genevasolutions.news/ukraine-stories/in-ukraine-jews-embrace-their-double-identity, https://www.npr.org/2022/10/01/1126217137/jewish-ukrainian-father-son-soldiers-russia-war), Zelensky himself is a Ukrainian Jewish president, so is Russia a legitimate threat against Israel given that Russia is murdering and willing to murder ethnic Jews in Ukraine?

I wouldn't presume to know his actual motivations. I don't know him and I'm not a psychologist.
— Jack Rogozhin
You don't have to be. A good start is to read what Putin has said and written. There's bound to be some links to his actual motivations on what he has written or what speeches he has given. — ssu

First, your name in the quotation came from the quotation function not from me — neomac


As you can see, that quote couldn't have come from the quote function as it was SSU's quote responding to me. To willfully misrepresent that is either a mistake or dishonest; i'll assume it was the former — Jack Rogozhin

Then I don’t know what else went wrong in my quotation and I don’t mind to correct it. If you wish so, just tell me. This incident is however irrelevant to the point I was making and I also acknowledged that the word “accusation” was bad wording, so I’m not going to waste more time on such mishaps.

I didn’t formulate my question appropriately. I was wrong in using the word “accusation” there. Mea culpa. What however I noticed is that ssu didn’t make any explicit knowledge claim first, it was you to introduce it while commenting his claims, to question ssu implicit knowledge claim. I didn’t find it fair because “if you can ground your claims about Russian imperialism on non-speech acts — neomac


SSU did make a knowledge claim about how I could know things. I, on the other hand didn't "ground my claims on Russian imperialism on non-speech acts" and you didn't show I did. Also you are mixing up two discussions here, try to stick the one that was at hand — Jack Rogozhin

Ssu’s implicit claim came after you solicited him and he clarified on what grounds he made his claims. At the first round, your response seemed to me something like: Putin did not commit imperialist acts, therefore Putin didn’t have imperialist motivations. Were this the case, then you too in the end were making an implicit knowledge claim on Putin’s motivations, just you took Putin’s acts as more relevant evidence than Putin’s words to assess imperialist motivations.
But then at a second round you wrote “I'm not addressing the motivations here; I'm addressing the act. Those are not the same things”, so you are addressing just “the act”. And you wrote “when Russia extends greatly beyond the Donbass and begins regularly taking resources from that area and its citizens, then I will consider it imperialism”, so what I understood so far is that you can assess Russian imperialism based on such acts, independently from whatever Putin’s declared motivations were. I take such acts to be broadly “non-speech acts” because such acts are not talking and writing. So yes you were grounding your claims on non-speech acts actually or hypothetically committed by Russia, while ssu was arguing based on what was written and said by Putin, so broadly Putin’s speech-acts, to legitimise what Putin did (invading and annexing Ukrainian territories).
The point here is that your claims are implicit knowledge claims grounded on certain evidences relevant for your understanding of “imperialism” as much as ssu’s implicit knowledge claims are grounded on other evidences relevant for his understanding of “imperialism”. And as long as one just expresses one’s beliefs to illustrate one’s own implicit assumptions to an interlocutor who doesn’t necessarily share them there is nothing really challenging about it, one is simply talking past each other.

Forth, to be clear, if I don’t understand your reasoning or your assumptions, and I feel like questioning them, then I’ll question them. I've been doing this for several hundred pages before you joined the thread and nothing could change it. That’s a philosophy forum after all. — neomac


I never said you can't question my reasonings...I made no assumptions. I said you can't misrepresent my reasoning and arguments as you are doing now. This is a philosophy forum after all — Jack Rogozhin

The point is that if I misrepresented them, maybe it’s because I didn’t understand them and need to question your claims to understand them better, after all you do not seem to understand my claims either. And since we are at the beginning of our exchange, you joined just recently this thread, and we don’t know each other from other threads unintentional misunderstandings are likely to happen on such controversial political topics.

Unless your glibly usage of the verb “to show” shows otherwise. — neomac


My usage of the verb "to show" wasn't glib; it was accurate — Jack Rogozhin

Whatever makes you happy.

I didn’t say that one has “to distinguish imperialism motivations from non-materialist motivations when one does so with imperialist and non-materialist acts”. — neomac


You did say that.

I took as premises your distinctions between motivations and acts, between imperialist acts and non-imperialist acts, and between imperialist motivations and non-imperialist motivations, and then concluded that also imperialist motivations and imperialist acts are distinct. If set M (set of motivations) is distinct from set A (set of actions), M is constituted by subsets M1 and M2 (e.g. imperialist and non-imperialist motivations), and A is constituted by subsets A1 and A2 (e.g. imperialist and non-imperialist acts), then M is distinct from A subsets as much as A is distinct from M subsets as much as M subsets are distinct from A subsets. This conditional must be logically true if we understand the notion of “distinction” in the same way. If not, I literally do not understand what you are claiming. — neomac


So what is your point here? I literally do not understand what you are claiming — Jack Rogozhin

Again, I was asking questions for you to clarify your views, not making a point yet. The question was: “by distinguishing imperialist acts and imperialist motivations, are you suggesting that non-imperialist acts can have imperialist motivations and that imperialist acts can have no imperialist motivations?”. You had problems to understand the question, so I clarified in that piece you quoted, that my understanding is that since you distinguish motivations and acts then you also distinguish imperialist motivations and imperialist acts, because this is what your claims would allow me to logically infer. So I hope that after my clarifications you can answer the question.

Your final balance sheet of what you succeeded in showing and I failed at every round doesn't impress me and, worse, it shows nothing more than your lack of self-confidence to me. — neomac


This is just ad hominem and projection. It shows nothing more than your lack of self-confidence to me. And what do you mean by "final balance sheet"? It's a bizarre phrase for a philosophical discussion — Jack Rogozhin

Again, whatever makes you happy.

All right, can you give me your definition of “selfishness” as a general characteristic that is not about motivations and psychologies? Because after a quick check on wikipedia — neomac


Yes: the quality or condition of being selfish...from Merrian-Webster. As I said, it's a characteristic — Jack Rogozhin

Sure a psychological characteristic concerning people’s motivations. Not, say, a chemical characteristic concerning unicorns’ rainbow farts, or am I misinterpreting you?

You see, there is a lot more to unpack in your “evaluating acts on their own to a great degree”. Each example of “immediate and primary causes” you listed is controversial and can be used to argue the opposite, namely that the alleged coups and their consequences were “immediate and primary causes” for Ukraine to look for Western support against a foreign power messing up within its territory, and discounting the fact that Ukrainian ethnic Russians and Russophone are still Ukrainians and must abide by Ukrainians rules. — neomac


No, nothing I said was controversial. You keep making claims without backing them up, and that is not appropriate for a philosophical conversation. Also, the notion citizens have to abide by their country's rules no matter what is both wrong and anti-Humanist. According to you, American slaves and Native Americans needed to bow to its country's rules of slavery and oppression, and Japanese Americans would have been wrong to defy the US' internment of them...and all rebels, including the American Revolutionaries were inherently wrong. This is pure authoritarianism. Poroshenko literally said Russian Ukrainians of the Donbas would be cut off from state benefits and their own language and you want them to sit like good dogs and take it...because rules? — Jack Rogozhin

First, yes it is controversial for one reason or the other, again you just recently joined the thread, and I’m not here to keep you up-to-date on what has been discussed in this thread. Just as an example, what you call “the Maidan coup” has sparked some controversy in this thread at least 7 months ago (https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/776025), use the search function. Also the alleged Ukrainian war crimes sparked some controversies in this thread.
Second, I didn’t claim that “the notion citizens have to abide by their country's rules no matter what”. My claim wasn’t about moral assessments of laws and related citizens’ attitude, it was about what Russia can claim as a legitimate threat against Russia. Even if Ukraine is repressing or oppressing a minority of its own citizens, that doesn’t seem to be a threat against Russia (so much so that Russia needed to distribute Russian passports into annexed territories to have a convenient pretext that Ukraine is threatening Russian citizens). If China tortures, imprisons, and persecutes Chinese muslim Uyghurs that doesn’t count as a legitimate threat against muslim states either. Right? BTW Russia too oppresses minorities up until now (like the Crimean Tatars which were occupying Crimea way before the Russians) that doesn’t make it a legitimate threat against other states (other than Ukraine of course, since Crimean Tatars are Ukrainian citizens too within Ukrainian territories), or does it?

"I wouldn't presume to know his actual motivations. I don't know him and I'm not a psychologist.
— Jack Rogozhin
You don't have to be. A good start is to read what Putin has said and written. There's bound to be some links to his actual motivations on what he has written or what speeches he has given."
— Jack Rogozhin

The reason why I talked about “accusation” is that in the passage you just quoted ssu is arguing about a link between Putin’s motivations and what he said. So if you can ground your claims about Russian imperialism on non-speech acts (like invading and annexing Donbas and Crimea) others can ground their claims about Russian imperialism on speech acts (like denying Ukrainian identity as distinct from the Russian, talking about denazifying Ukraine) made to legitimate certain non-speech acts. — neomac


That second quote isnt mine (it's SSU's). So, I still made no accusation and you haven't shown I have. I also made no speech acts and you haven't shown I have. Also, you don't get to tell me how I make my arguments, just as I don't get to tell you how you make yours. Let's actually discuss the issue — Jack Rogozhin

First, your name in the quotation came from the quotation function not from me.
Second, you are right. I didn’t formulate my question appropriately. I was wrong in using the word “accusation” there. Mea culpa. What however I noticed is that ssu didn’t make any explicit knowledge claim first, it was you to introduce it while commenting his claims, to question ssu implicit knowledge claim. I didn’t find it fair because “if you can ground your claims about Russian imperialism on non-speech acts (like invading and annexing Donbas and Crimea) others can ground their claims about Russian imperialism on speech acts (like denying Ukrainian identity as distinct from the Russian, talking about denazifying Ukraine) made to legitimate certain non-speech acts.”
Third, when I talked about “speech acts” I was referring to the acts committed by Russia, not you. You based your arguments on Russian invasion and annexation, ssu based his arguments based on what Putin said and wrote to legitimate Russian invasion and annexation.
Forth, to be clear, if I don’t understand your reasoning or your assumptions, and I feel like questioning them, then I’ll question them. I've been doing this for several hundred pages before you joined the thread and nothing could change it. That’s a philosophy forum after all.

Where did I distinguish between imperialist acts and imperialist motivations? Where did I say the invasion was an imperialist act, and how do you draw that suggestion from the first premise? You're making a lot of unfounded assumptions here
— Jack Rogozhin

Dude, chill down, I’m still exploring your assumptions with some questions. You distinguish acts from motivations (“I'm not addressing the motivations here; I'm addressing the act. Those are not the same things”). And then you distinguish imperialist acts from non-imperialist acts (“when Russia extends greatly beyond the Donbass and begins regularly taking resources from that area and its citizens, then I will consider it imperialism”). Therefore you must distinguish imperialist motivations (if also some motivations can be qualified as imperialist) from imperialist actions too, that’s logic.
I didn’t say nor implied that you said “the invasion was an imperialist act”. I’m aware you are trying to argue against it. — neomac


I am and was chill, and my quote you posted shows that. So, you need to chill a bit yourself. I made no assumptions. As I showed, you have and did. And no, one does not have to distinguish imperialism motivations from non-materialist motivations when one does so with imperialist and non-materialist acts, and I already showed that. Your saying otherwise is just an assumption, not logic. Show otherwise if you can — Jack Rogozhin

Unless your glibly usage of the verb “to show” shows otherwise.
I didn’t say that one has “to distinguish imperialism motivations from non-materialist motivations when one does so with imperialist and non-materialist acts”. I took as premises your distinctions between motivations and acts, between imperialist acts and non-imperialist acts, and between imperialist motivations and non-imperialist motivations, and then concluded that also imperialist motivations and imperialist acts are distinct. If set M (set of motivations) is distinct from set A (set of actions), M is constituted by subsets M1 and M2 (e.g. imperialist and non-imperialist motivations), and A is constituted by subsets A1 and A2 (e.g. imperialist and non-imperialist acts), then M is distinct from A subsets as much as A is distinct from M subsets as much as M subsets are distinct from A subsets. This conditional must be logically true if we understand the notion of “distinction” in the same way. If not, I literally do not understand what you are claiming.
So either those premises are wrong or we do not share the same notion of “distinction”. That’s all there is to clarify to me at this point.
Again, I’m simply asking questions to understand your assumptions (for example on what you take to be imperialist or a legitimate threat). And for that reason I do not want my non-shared implicit assumptions nor misreadings nor my slips of the tongue get in the way of your attempts to clarify yourself. What I can’t avoid however is to question your views on things I find unclear or unconvincing about your claims. Your final balance sheet of what you succeeded in showing and I failed at every round doesn't impress me and, worse, it shows nothing more than your lack of self-confidence to me.

OK when you are talking about selfish leaders (selfishness here is about leaders' psychology and motivations, right?) you do not mean to address particular motivations or psychologies but general ones. — neomac


No, selfishness is a characteristic, not a motivation. If a hot-headed person yells at someone because they are hot-headed, that doesn't mean they are motivated by hot-headedness. Again, you are drawing unfounded conclusions.
— Jack Rogozhin

I didn’t mean that selfishness is a motivation, but that when you talk about leaders’ selfishness you are talking about psychology and motivations of such leaders. Indeed, it’s hard for me to even understand what you mean by “selfishness” without referring to people’s motivations. — neomac


I showed why this you're wrong here in the quote you quoted of mine above. I'm sorry your understanding of "selfishness" is limited as such — Jack Rogozhin

All right, can you give me your definition of “selfishness” as a general characteristic that is not about motivations and psychologies? Because after a quick check on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_egoism) I find statements like this: Psychological egoism is the view that humans are always motivated by self-interest and selfishness, even in what seem to be acts of altruism. It claims that, when people choose to help others, they do so ultimately because of the personal benefits that they themselves expect to obtain, directly or indirectly, from so doing. And this is also what I mean when I claim that “selfishness” even as a general characteristic is still about psychology and motivations.

If ordinary peoples’ judgments of politicians are just a reflection of their own bias, then every ordinary person’s judgement of Putin would just be their bias, not an objective judgment. I'm surprised you believe that
— Jack Rogozhin

First, my claim was generic about ordinary people’s bias, I didn’t say every ordinary person is biased about politicians’ selfishness. Generic generalisations should not be conflated with universal generalisations. The bias I’m referring to can be read in different ways: e.g. avg politicians may be prone to selfish reasoning no more than avg ordinary people, “selfish” reasoning may not always be a bad thing as much as ordinary people would assume.
Second, concerning Putin, he may hold some nationalist motivations (and I don’t take nationalism to be a form a selfishness) besides worrying about his own political or material survival (which would be a more selfish motivation). — neomac


Generic and universal work the same here; universal is just more extreme. You made a claim about how ordinary people are biased towards politicians, and I correctly showed how that would apply to their (including your) view of Putin as well — Jack Rogozhin

First, if you intend to question my assumptions appropriately, fine but you have to understand them as close as possible to how I understand them. I didn’t make a particularly strong claim, I just made a cautious conjecture. Concerning the distinction of generic generalisations and universal generalisations, they are not the same as far as my claims are concerned, I clarified what I meant, plus there is a whole entry in SEP (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/generics/), if you are unfamiliar with it.
Second, I also answered positively about Putin to the extent that ordinary people’s may be biased about Putin’s selfishness too. I don’t find it implausible that Putin could be motivated to some extent by genuine nationalist reasons as his rhetoric of the great patriotic war, the Russian minority genocide in Ukraine and Russian Crimea suggests, and I don’t take Putin’s nationalist motives to be selfish motives as such. That is perfectly compatible with Putin also having more selfish motives like his political survival.

I asked you the same question by mistake. Indeed my second question should have been “was Russia a legitimate threat to Ukraine before after the invasion of Crimea?”. I’m not making “the presumption Russia just invaded Crimea out of the blue without taking into account the factors preceding and causing that” (assumed it makes sense). On the contrary I’m reasoning from your own assumptions. You yourself claimed “histories are important, but we still have to evaluate acts on their own to a great degree” (like all the declarations against Ukraine joining NATO) and “a legitimate threat to the security of a nation and its borders, and the safety of its people, is a legimtiate threat”. So If NATO could be perceived as a legitimate threat by Russia, why couldn’t Russia be perceived as a legitimate threat by Ukraine prior the invasion of Crimea and/or after? — neomac


Yes, and evaluating acts on their own to a great degree includes immediate and primary causes, with less (but not no) attention given to older history. That would include the Maidan coup, the burning alive of the Crimean anti-coup protesters in the trade house building, Kiev's shelling of the Donbass Ukrainians, and Kiev's admitted (Merkle admits this too) breaking of the Minsk Accords

I answered your final question in my last post. You're repeating your questions again — Jack Rogozhin

You see, there is a lot more to unpack in your “evaluating acts on their own to a great degree”. Each example of “immediate and primary causes” you listed is controversial and can be used to argue the opposite, namely that the alleged coups and their consequences were “immediate and primary causes” for Ukraine to look for Western support against a foreign power messing up within its territory, and discounting the fact that Ukrainian ethnic Russians and Russophone are still Ukrainians and must abide by Ukrainians rules. But I’m not interested to investigate them further at this point. What I would say though is that none of them SHOWS “a legitimate threat to the security of a nation and its borders, and the safety of its people, is a legimtiate threat” AGAINST Russia to me, does it to you? The torture, imprisonment, and persecution of (more than a million?) muslim Uyghurs by China doesn’t count as a legitimate threat to muslim states from China, or does it to you?

I didn't accuse others. He said he knew Putin's motivations beforehand
— Jack Rogozhin

Where did he say it? Can you quote him saying this verbatim? — neomac

Here you go:

"I wouldn't presume to know his actual motivations. I don't know him and I'm not a psychologist.
— Jack Rogozhin
You don't have to be. A good start is to read what Putin has said and written. There's bound to be some links to his actual motivations on what he has written or what speeches he has given." — Jack Rogozhin

The reason why I talked about “accusation” is that in the passage you just quoted ssu is arguing about a link between Putin’s motivations and what he said. So if you can ground your claims about Russian imperialism on non-speech acts (like invading and annexing Donbas and Crimea) others can ground their claims about Russian imperialism on speech acts (like denying Ukrainian identity as distinct from the Russian, talking about denazifying Ukraine) made to legitimate certain non-speech acts.

By distinguishing imperialist acts and imperialist motivations, are you suggesting that non-imperialist acts can have imperialist motivations and that imperialist acts have no imperialist motivations? If so, do you have historical examples to illustrate your point? — neomac


Where did I distinguish between imperialist acts and imperialist motivations? Where did I say the invasion was an imperialist act, and how do you draw that suggestion from the first premise? You're making a lot of unfounded assumptions here — Jack Rogozhin

Dude, chill down, I’m still exploring your assumptions with some questions. You distinguish acts from motivations (“I'm not addressing the motivations here; I'm addressing the act. Those are not the same things”). And then you distinguish imperialist acts from non-imperialist acts (“when Russia extends greatly beyond the Donbass and begins regularly taking resources from that area and its citizens, then I will consider it imperialism”). And you also seem to acknowledge that imperialist motivations can exist in political leaders, but you don't know if Putin's motivations are imperialist, that's why you focus on acts. Therefore you must distinguish imperialist motivations from imperialist actions too, that’s logic.
I didn’t say nor implied that you said “the invasion was an imperialist act”. I’m aware you are trying to argue against it.

OK when you are talking about selfish leaders (selfishness here is about leaders' psychology and motivations, right?) you do not mean to address particular motivations or psychologies but general ones. — neomac


No, selfishness is a characteristic, not a motivation. If a hot-headed person yells at someone because they are hot-headed, that doesn't mean they are motivated by hot-headedness. Again, you are drawing unfounded conclusions. — Jack Rogozhin

I didn’t mean that selfishness is a motivation, but that when you talk about leaders’ selfishness you are talking about psychology and motivations of such leaders. Indeed, it’s hard for me to even understand what you mean by “selfishness” without referring to people’s motivations.

Talking generally about motivations and psychologies , I suspect that the difference between politicians and ordinary people in terms of "selfishness" may be biased in favor ordinary people when the judgement comes from ordinary people. — neomac


If ordinary peoples’ judgments of politicians are just a reflection of their own bias, then every ordinary person’s judgement of Putin would just be their bias, not an objective judgment. I'm surprised you believe that — Jack Rogozhin

First, my claim was generic about ordinary people’s bias, I didn’t say every ordinary person is biased about politicians’ selfishness. Generic generalisations should not be conflated with universal generalisations. The bias I’m referring to can be read in different ways: e.g. avg politicians may be prone to selfish reasoning no more than avg ordinary people, “selfish” reasoning may not always be as bad as ordinary people would often assume.
Second, concerning Putin, he may hold some nationalist motivations (and I don’t take nationalism to be a form a selfishness) besides worrying about his own political or material survival (which would be a more selfish motivation).

Was Russia a legitimate threat to Ukraine before the invasion of Crimea? If so when did it start to become a legitimate threat to Ukraine? If not, was Russia a legitimate threat to Ukraine before the invasion of Crimea? — neomac


You ask the same question twice here and you make the presumption Russia just invaded Crimea out of the blue without taking into account the factors preceding and causing that, so the question is a loaded one. Also, if by threat, you mean actually threatening Ukraine,I would say no — Jack Rogozhin

I asked you the same question by mistake. Indeed my second question should have been “was Russia a legitimate threat to Ukraine before after the invasion of Crimea?”. I’m not making “the presumption Russia just invaded Crimea out of the blue without taking into account the factors preceding and causing that” (assumed it makes sense). On the contrary I’m reasoning from your own assumptions. You yourself claimed “histories are important, but we still have to evaluate acts on their own to a great degree” (like all the declarations against Ukraine joining NATO) and “a legitimate threat to the security of a nation and its borders, and the safety of its people, is a legimtiate threat”. So If NATO could be perceived as a legitimate threat by Russia, why couldn’t Russia be perceived as a legitimate threat by Ukraine prior to the invasion of Crimea and/or after?

I didn't accuse others. He said he knew Putin's motivations beforehand — Jack Rogozhin

Where did he say it? Can you quote him saying this verbatim?

Because I'm not addressing the motivations here; I'm addressing the act. Those are not the same things — Jack Rogozhin

By distinguishing imperialist acts and imperialist motivations, are you suggesting that non-imperialist acts can have imperialist motivations and that imperialist acts have no imperialist motivations? If so, do you have historical examples to illustrate your point?
BTW psychologists typically talk about motivations based on people's behavior (words and acts), right?

I'm not addressing motivations or psychologies here. I'm addressing general characteristics...and most leaders' today, particualry the ones Ilisted, are greatly driven by self interest....as many firemen/women are greatly driven by wanting to help people. You think otherwise? — Jack Rogozhin

OK when you are talking about selfish leaders (selfishness here is about leaders' psychology and motivations, right?) you do not mean to address particular motivations or psychologies but general ones. Talking generally about motivations and psychologies , I suspect that the difference between politicians and ordinary people in terms of "selfishness" may be biased in favor ordinary people when the judgement comes from ordinary people.

A legitimate threat to the security of a nation and its borders, and the safety of its people, is a legimtiate threat. — Jack Rogozhin

Was Russia a legitimate threat to Ukraine before the invasion of Crimea? If so when did it start to become a legitimate threat to Ukraine? If not, was Russia a legitimate threat to Ukraine before the invasion of Crimea?