The problem has always been the assumption of a foundation instead of lateral corroboration. It's like doing a puzzle, but taking all the pieces apart to put a new one in. We don't really confirm things against everything that's come before in a linear process. — Cheshire

You're saying it's like a bubble universe?

Yeah, as I mentioned, I recall reading somewhere where he says truth in natural language was "meaningless," — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think he meant meaningless, but definitely indefinable: too basic to define.

So, STT is originally/intended to be deflationary I guess, which jives with how it is often used. — Count Timothy von Icarus

In his paper he basically says that the concept of truth had disappeared from math. He felt like it could be brought back in some form, and he is ground zero for renewed interest in truth. It's just not correspondence, because that concept resists clarification sufficient for math and logic.

Deflation can be truth skepticism, which is what redundancy is. @Nagase explained once that some use the T-sentence rule without being skeptics, emphasizing that indefinable isn't the same as meaningless.

Well, if we follow the evidence it suggest that self-reference isn't a reliable source of truth, in the sense the system breaks down per Russell and Godel — Cheshire

I've always wondered if Russell's paradox is coming from the foundations of set theory: the contradiction of fencing in infinity. Maybe when I land on a deserted island all by myself I'll sit and figure it out. :razz:

Apparently the controversy stems from some comments from Popper. The fact that this is not the prevailing interpretation is reflected in two articles in the SEP about Tarski and his definition.

Notice that they don't use "correspondence" to describe his definition, but focus on logical consequences and satisfaction.

If you have university access you can read Susan Haack's article, which lays out explicitly how we know Tarski did not see himself as offering any definition for truth in natural languages. Just Google Haack on Tarski.

I kind of thought of Tarski's paper, that I still struggle with reading, was basically a correspondence theory of truth? — Moliere

I'm basing that on what Scott Soames and Susan Haack said about it. Tarski's truth predicate doesn't even mean truth in the common sense. It's more like satisfaction.

Either way, what I'm hoping to convey is that logical theories like Russell's are attempting to accommodate any metaphysics of truth -- else it would be begging the question on truth. — Moliere

I'm not sure, but it leads me to this question: Frege's account of the indefinability if truth is a logical brick house. Why couldn't a pluralist say, "that's not helping me, I think it would be more interesting to create a logic that eliminates Frege's concerns."

AP would have gone in an entirely different track, possibly into a ditch. How does that work?

It doesn't model correspondence theory. For Tarski, it was a way of handling the truth predicate in formal languages. Maybe he would have wished he could resurrect correspondence, but he knew he hadn't.

"P" is true IFF P is a formulation of redundancy among other things. It would be cool if @Nagase stopped by, for a number of reasons.

It's faith.

That wasn't reframing. We were talking about why a monist might insist on a logic for all cases when it's not clear what that logic would be.

"Keep your mind too open and it will fill up with garbage". — Banno

:grin:

Which means it's methodological - it's about attitude. Closed or open. — Banno

The saying is "Be open minded, but not so open minded your brain rolls out."

Monism, and authoritarianism, offer certainty. — Banno

Which means it can't be defeated.

My hypothesis is that there's a deep seated drive in most people to insist on logical monism. I think it's related to unity of consciousness: one self, one world, one logic. I think pluralists are using the term differently.

No, burying them is not immoral per se. This doesn’t violate any of their rights which are applicable to dead people. — Bob Ross

Thanks for clarifying that. How about cremation? Does burning in a furnace violate the corpse's fundamental human rights?

Bob. We burn corpses. We bury them. Are you saying this is immoral?

You said that dead people have no rights; therefore, your position necessitates that it is not impermissible, in principle, to do those horrific things. That was my point. — Bob Ross

You wouldn't be violating the corpse's rights if you did horrific things to it. We would check you in to the nearest psych ward for other reasons.

So you believe someone can have sex with a dead corpse? — Bob Ross

Uh ...

So you believe that a person's organs can be harvested even if they did not previously consent? — Bob Ross

I think that's a matter of respecting the wishes of the person who is now gone.

Also, I will say that, to your point, your example exemplifies a rare occurrence in abortion-situations in the West (if we were to map it over) because in your example the women are doing it solely for the benefit of the child—so it is a complete sense of respect for them (even though I think what they are doing is immoral). — Bob Ross

Yep.

Where it gets controversial, is what rights (if any) a brain dead human being has (and, likewise, a completely dead human being has). — Bob Ross

Probably none

There's a considerable ambiguity in natural language terms and concepts, which gives them a kind of cohesion through fuzzy boundaries, which can then be interpreted as a coherent unity, — fdrake

Maybe there's a basic imperative to gather everything into a single framework.

Could you flesh out exactly what you're saying about fully developed humans like yourself? I'm assuming it's not that you think you have some sort of divine grace. Why should you have legal protection? Is it a matter of sentiment?

Just a history note: in Jamaica, during the time the English used slave labor there, all the slave women who became pregnant aborted their pregnancies so that their children wouldn't grow up in the world they were living in. The same would have been true in Brazil, but there were very harsh punishments for abortion there

It's not true that all women who have sought abortions denied the humanity of what they were killing, and this is still true today.

I don't exactly object to classical logic, though -- I'm saying it has limitations, not that it's wrong in every case. — Moliere

Right. Logical pluralism is saying that there is no one logic that applies to all cases. A logical pluralist would agree that the LONC is useful... where it's useful.

That you value those cells over the person who must carry them is heinous. — Banno

Yes, pro-life people are heinous. They're like those creatures from the Lord of the Rings who are some kind of supernatural evil. They never bathe and they have fangs and they're all ugly.

Just immigrate to Canada, dude. They won't be able to find you!

:up:

A tale. One of the pre- socratics - I forget which - "proved" that air becomes colder under pressure by blowing on his figure. The breath feels cold. And we all know that a wind is cold. Hence, he disproved that gases under pressure increases in temperature. Do we take this as a refutation of thermodynamics? — Banno

Exactly. We don't use logic to tell us what's in the world. If we did, we'd still be in the stone age.

I've gathered that you're just not going to answer that question. That's cool. :up:

Does the fact that it doesn't make sense to speak about something "moving greenly," "economic recessions being pink," or "plants being prime," only have to do with the rules of competent language use and not with what those things actually are? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Good question.

Sure, that was just an example on the relevance of content to meaningful predication. But Russell's paradox is about stipulated sign systems, "languages," no? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Tarski is stipulated sign systems. Set theory is fairly intuitive. Even the foundations, which obviously directly defy Aristotle, are fairly easy to embrace, especially after you've studied calculus. I guess you could target set theory's foundations in favor of finitism. Is that what you're thinking?

What would be an example of a paradox in nature? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't know. My consciousness might have to evolve some before I can see it. My question, though, is do you think the possibilities of our universe are limited by what appears inconceivable to us?

For example, we can say "red" or "angry" of the number "4," in ways that are entirely correct vis-á-vis form. Yet obviously such talk is nonsensical because if one considers the content of: "the number four is angry and red," it is clear that the subject is not of the sort that it can possibly possess these predicates (obviously, this implies we are speaking of the number, not some drawing of 4 in a children's book, which might indeed be angry and red). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think this is about competent language use. Russell's paradox isn't about language use. It's not nonsensical.

In essence, material logic is more concerned with the actual content and how it corresponds to reality, whereas formal logic deals with abstract structures and patterns of reasoning

I asked you before: are you saying that if X is paradoxical, it can't exist? I guess I'm wondering if this is a question you don't want to address for some reason?

If you do this, you just have the study of completely arbitrary systems, and there are infinitely many such systems and no way to vet which are worth investigating. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree with this. Roughly what I'm thinking is that consciousness evolves and that this involves both changes in environmental conditions and native mental flexibility. So, for instance, if the people who inhabit a two-dimensional world evolve into beings who can experience three dimensions, it will be partly because the environment makes it so they need to, but long before the general population changes, there will be those who have been expressing flexibility, even though it may have seemed pointless to those around them. These will be people who denied that their traditional logic limited them or the world.

Therefore it's ok to do pointless investigations. It's always been part of what we are, since at least 60,000 years.

Especially because the liar's sentence gives justification to P2 in the original argument: No principle holds in complete generality. — Moliere

Yep

I don't think future potential is all that relevant. — Michael

Maybe your society is different from mine. Where I am, prognosis is more important for life and death decisions than present state.

Forcing a mother to carry to term and birth a child because the 1 day old zygote in her womb is a living organism with human DNA just ain't right. — Michael

I agree. The day-after pill pretty much solves that problem. All women should be able to get it at no cost. Men don't have to pay anything if they generate a zygote. Women shouldn't either.

It's true that if there is no consciousness, it helps in making the decision not to intervene and let a baby die, but ultimately the decision is more about prognosis than whatever the present state is. For instance, if a baby has a head bleed and the brain is squashed because of that, we go ahead and intervene because of the possibility that the brain could recover and grow. And we do make death easier for children who are fully conscious, but can't live off of special machinery. That's basically killing them, again, because of what we know the future holds.

Think about how that focus on what the future holds bears on the disposition of a fetus. The human potential includes Einstein and Mozart. :grimace:

Is it that formal logic outlines how one statement follows from another, and material logic looks at the limits of thought and language?

The issue here seems to lie in predication, and so it's more obvious that there has to be a metaphysical side to the investigation — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do you think the possibilities for this universe are limited by what strikes us as conceivable?

I was looking for a 'it can't happen because it's illogical.'

Care to step up to the plate?

If we follow the peripatetic axiom that "nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses," my question is "where are the paradoxes in the senses or out in the world?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

A paradox is not the type of thing that has a location.

I have never experienced anything both be and not be without qualification, only stipulated sign systems that declare that "if something is true it is false," and stuff of that sort. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not having experienced it so far doesn't rule it out, though.