I don't understand why non-Americans always focus on the stuff that doesn't really matter. You guys should read more Wall Street Journal and less of whatever it is you're reading.

Politics suggest we may not get the best of all possible worlds. Sure, tariffs turned out less bad than feared. Even if the most extreme claims of Democrats that democracy is dying turned out to be right, investors have long been able to make good returns from stocks in autocracies, so long as the autocrat doesn’t fall foul of more-powerful countries.

But the president’s firing of the BLS head and attacks on the Federal Reserve mean the U.S. is less likely to get decent data on its most important statistics or nonpolitical interest-rate — WSJ

but the question of why it is more plausible seems to lie in the ability to equivocate on the way in which water, ice, and steam "are" H2O — Count Timothy von Icarus

There's no equivocation. Steam is water in the same way the statue is clay.

Too much caffeine will do that.

Sorry, but I don't really get the relevance of being an abstract object to rigid designation. — Ludwig V

9 is the same abstract object in all possible worlds, so it's a rigid designator.

I think the number of planets is a singular definite description. It's not the same in all possible worlds.

9 is an abstract object.

Yes, but don't see how it applies in the planets case. — Ludwig V

The planet case is a misapplication because the number of planets isn't a proper noun. Both t1 and t2 have to be rigid designators.

Fine. I don't think you're really looking for my input here. :smile:

I'm afraid I don't know or can't recall exactly what the identity elimination schema. Do you mind just outlining what it is? — Ludwig V

This is from the IEP article. (Beware, I've found incorrect info in the IEP before).

A little more formally, the rule of inference =E can be stated as:

Identity Elimination Schema

Major: t1 = t2

Minor: ϕ(t1)

Conclusion: ϕ(t2)

Here t1 and t2 are expressions which refer to entities (for example, proper names of people or cities). ϕ(t1) is a sentence containing at least one occurrence of t1, and ϕ(t2) is a sentence that results from replacing at least one occurrence of t1 in ϕ(t1) with an occurrence of t2, eliminating the “=” of t1 = t2. Recurring ti presumes that ti is univocal throughout, and recurring ϕ presumes that the sentential context ϕ is not altered, syntactically or semantically, by the replacement. If these uniformity conditions are not met, then the inference scheme is being misapplied, and it is no wonder that false conclusions are derivable. For example, in the inference “The man behind Fred = the man in front of Bill; the man behind Fred saw him leave; therefore, the man in front of Bill saw him leave,” the context “saw him leave” is not uniform, since substitution of “the man behind Fred” by “the man in front of Bill” changes the reference of “him” (Fine 1989:222–3; Linsky 1967:104).

In discussing the problem with apparent substitution-failure by using =E, many examples will be drawn from the fictional story of Superman, treated as if it were true. In the story, a child from the planet Krypton, Kal-El, is sent to Earth, where physical conditions cause him to acquire superpowers. Wearing specific clothing (red cape, blue jumpsuit), Kal-El prevents disasters, rescues endangered innocents, and foils would-be perpetrators of crimes, such as Lex Luthor. People call Kal-El “Superman” when talking about Kal-El’s actions of this kind.

But Kal-El also takes a day job as a reporter, using the name “Clark Kent.” A coworker, Lois Lane, treats him with indifference in the office, but has a pronounced crush on, as she would put it, Superman, unaware they are the same individual.

The problematic examples discussed below involve ascriptions of mental states to Lois (or occasionally Lex), arrived at by applying the rule =E to the major premise “Superman is Clark” and a carefully chosen minor premise. Lois has a crush on Superman (minor premise), so, by =E, Lois has a crush on Clark. But this latter seems false, and would certainly be rejected by Lois herself. Also, Lois believes that Superman can fly, but does not seem to believe that Clark can; she hopes to see Superman again soon, but seems not much to care when she next sees Clark; she would like a date with Superman, but apparently has no interest in one with Clark; and so on — IEP

So after explaining the Superman substitution failure, the IEP sort of asks if this might be a misapplication of the schema. It goes through some misapplications, which I looked at

a. Istanbul is Constantinople.
b. “Istanbul” has eight letters.
c. ∴ “Constantinople” has eight letters.
— IEP

In this case, the problem is coming from the use of Tarskian quotation, which means the quoted part is a word, not a city.
-----------------------------------------
a. Giorgione is Barbarelli.
b. Giorgione is so-called because of his size.
c. ∴ Barbarelli is so-called because of his size.
— IEP

The flaw here is equivocation. The "so-called because of his size" can't skip from one name to the next.
--------------------------------------------

a. The number of planets = 3 squared
b. It is contingent that the number of planets = 9
c. ∴ It is contingent that 3 squared = 9.
— IEP — frank

We end up concluding that this isn't a case of misapplication, but we still have a substitution failure. Are you familiar with de re vs de dicto?

You aren't using the identity elimination schema there.

What's a subordinate protectorate?

Really, you believe that she was describing the collapse of Western civilization's reliance upon a foundational diety and challenge of finding a suitable replacement for the avoidance of existential crisis. — Hanover

No, I guess not. I still thought it was a cool post, though, clueless as I am.

What do you take to be the meaning of that often proffered quote? — Tom Storm

That Christianity didn't survive the Enlightenment, when it turned from living religion to fairy tales, the result being an identity crisis that's still unfolding.

Do you think that responsive to my post? — Hanover

I do. I didn't see a "poor me" in the OP. I saw this:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? — Nietzsche

Plus she was talking about a wound that gets passed down, having to do with the bloody conflict between Catholics and Protestants. If you walk away from the wound, you can end up feeling like the ancestral continuum has been broken. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Or so I've heard.

Had her mother been open to her questions, unconditionally loving and embracing, and in all ways the perfect mother, is Christianity vindicated? — Hanover

Christianity is a dying religion. Vindication, even if it were possible, wouldn't help.

But is it really? If one is aware, truly, of what shapes not only one's self but the entire world, is it not something perhaps a bit more internal? — Outlander

I can see why you would ask that, and it's a great question. It really highlights the stakes and what not.

Great post! I'll be back soon.

The problem is that your post is just a trauma dump, leaving the only appropriate response to be "sorry you went through that," and then maybe sharing similar stories we've had in order to validate your feelings.

Consider that done.

Now describe the lie (the intentional misrepresentation) of the truth by the Church, not just how the people in your life disappointed you. That way we might be able to respond philosophically, as opposed to just offering you personal encouragement. — Hanover

I didn't get that out of it. Philosophy is all about recognizing the forces that shaped you and trying to peep beyond them. If you don't encounter anything negative on that journey, you're probably in denial.

:up: :up: :up:

Yep. We might even go a step further and ask if the idea of essences is worth keeping. — Banno

Did Sartre's idea of essence appeal to you?

Also, the East tends to be a bit "looser" and more focused on "praxis," which I think is helpful. — Count Timothy von Icarus

My impression is that Greek Orthodox has more acceptance of mysticism. Do you have a favorite Orthodox writer?

Davidson is happy to say that people have beliefs, and to use beliefs to explain actions, and says that such explanations are causal.

So not behaviourist.

Anscombe - and by association, Wittgenstein - also accepts that actions are explained by beliefs. Neither is behaviourist. — Banno

No stones were being thrown. Just exploring.

"the essence is the 'is-ness' of something"

This is why they executed Socrates.

So did we just become best friends or something? — Fire Ologist

no

I think you're the only legit Catholic in the discussion, so let me assure you: if it's meaningful to you, you're right where we all are. None of us have final answers.

Ok.

Personally, I find the Catholic nature/supernature, natural reason/revelation dichotomies somewhat unhelpful, and they are a later development. Eastern Christianity tends to make no such distinction here on the ground that Adam's natural state was "little less than a god," — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ok. But you can't make an apology for the Catholic view by referring to Eastern Orthodox. Let's just leave it at this: on it's face, the Catholic Trinity appears to be contradictory. Catholics are aware of this, but deny that it's a contradiction, because the truth is beyond human comprehension. If we were enlightened, we would see that it's not a contradiction.

Not really, or at least not without many important caveats. The Trinity appears in Origen and others (although not in its mature Capaddocian formulation) but Origen is an older contemporary of Plotinus in Alexandria. — Count Timothy von Icarus

OK. Just Platonism, then.

Origen begins his treatise On First Principles by establishing, in typical Platonic fashion, a divine hierarchical triad; but instead of calling these principles by typical Platonic terms like monad, dyad, and world-soul, he calls them “Father,” “Christ,” and “Holy Spirit,” though he does describe these principles using Platonic language. The first of these principles, the Father, is a perfect unity, complete unto Himself, and without body – a purely spiritual mind. Since God the Father is, for Origen, “personal and active,” it follows that there existed with Him, always, an entity upon which to exercise His intellectual activity. This entity is Christ the Son, the Logos, or Wisdom (Sophia), of God, the first emanation of the Father, corresponding to Numenius’ “second god,” as we have seen above (section 2). The third and last principle of the divine triad is the Holy Spirit, who “proceeds from the Son and is related to Him as the Son is related to the Father” — IEP

Sounds not unlike Dissociative identity disorder. — Banno

Sounds about right.

As a matter of fact, ‘person’ was derived from ‘personae’, the masks worn by actors in Greek drama — Wayfarer

I meant that Augustine came up with the use of "person" to talk about the hypostases.

Regardless, surely Christians of any school or sect must recognize the distinction between persons and things must they not? — Wayfarer

I guess so. If you asked an ancient Westerner what makes apples fall to the ground, they would say "God."

Whether the Westerner in question was thinking of God as a person or not depends on the place and time.

Christianity is the most ideologically dynamic of all the global religions because it's a fusion of several different sets of cultural outlooks and values. It contains directly conflicting views, and for a while this allowed it to act as fertile ground for intellectual exploration. It's far from a simplistic religion of a bearded man in the sky.

But surely describing the persons of the Trinity as ‘things’ is even greater error than was mine. — Wayfarer

Augustine came up with the word "persons.". He didn't mean for that to be taken literally.

So Jesus is one of the things that is god, and the holy spirit is another, and the father, another. THree different things that are all god. — Banno

Right.

Ok. One last time. If you say the same wrong thing again, we'll just go our separate ways with no hard feelings, ok?

So two men both 'participate' in the form 'man' even though they are numerically different men. — Wayfarer

In this analogy, man is a category that two people are in. If you say Luke is a man, you are predicating. Luke is the subject, and man is the predicate. You're identifying a higher category, of which Luke is a part.

When Catholics say the Father is God, they are not predicating. They aren't saying God is a category the Father belongs to. It's an identity statement. The Father is not a section of God. The Father is fully God. Whatever God is, the Father is equal to that. If this sounds like a mystical multiplicity, that's because it is.

Eckhart would have understood this because his views were Neoplatonic, which is one of the sources for the Trinity.

So when you've got nothing substantial to add, you'll try condescending or sarcasm or ad homs, right? Rather than actually trying to engage in a conversation? It does make me wonder if I should bother interacting with you. — Wayfarer

It's just that you're going to give the same wrong account over and over. One can avoid frustration by walking away. :up:

But I think what I've said in the above posts acknowledges all of that. I said:

So two men both 'participate' in the form 'man' even though they are numerically different men. — Wayfarer

That's not how the Trinity works. I don't think that message is going to get through to you, so peace, buddy.

I'm not Catholic, but I am trying to portray what I think they would say. The Count has been scarce the last few days but I acknowledge that he has far greater knowledge of this than I do. — Wayfarer

He knows more than either of us, but I've known since childhood that Catholics don't believe that God is category that the hypostases belong to. The Trinity is supposed to be beyond human understanding. All we do is contact it through analogies. When Augustine used the words essence and persons, he didn't mean for you to bring God down to earth and sort it out the way you sort out a crowd of persons.

Given the confusions here, I'm not keen on moving on to it quite yet - it presumes quite a bit about the way we might view belief, and won't be understood without those presumptions. — Banno

I agree. But that snippet gives a hint as to why you can't get opacity with behaviorism. You'll end up with a de re reading of everything.

@Count Timothy von Icarus already explained why that isn't the Christian view, here

I don't think either of you are Catholic, though, so you don't have to worry about the consequences of heresy. :wink:

You can't surmise belief from action? Why not? — Banno

Maybe you could. I'll have to think on it. Anyway, if you're interested, this part of Davidson's argument that we can't tell what dog's believe from Rational Animals:

Norman Malcolm tells this story, which is intended to show that dogs think:

"Suppose our dog is chasing the neighbor’s cat. The latter runs full tilt toward the oak tree, but suddenly swerves at the last moment and disappears up a nearby maple. The dog doesn’t see this maneuver and on arriving at the oak tree he rears up on his hind feet, paws at the trunk as if trying to scale it, and barks excitedly into the branches above. We who observe this whole episode from a window say, ‘He thinks that the cat went up that oak tree’2. (Malcolm added, we would say the dog was barking up the wrong tree.)

Malcolm claims that under the circumstances someone who attributed that belief to the dog might well - almost surely would -be right; he would have exactly the sort of evidence needed to justify such an attribution. Let me give a preliminary argument designed to put Malcolm’s claim in doubt. It’s clear that the evidence for the dog’s ‘belief‘ depends on taking belief as a determinant of action and emotional response. We are asked to infer from what we see that the dog wants to catch the cat, that he runs where he does because of this desire and a belief about where the cat has gone, and that he is venting his frustration at not being able to follow the cat up the tree by barking, pawing the ground, and so forth.

The details do not need to be right, of course. The point is so far obvious: if we are justified in inferring beliefs, we are also justified in inferring intentions and desires (and perhaps much more). But how about the dog’s supposed belief that the cat went up that oak tree? That oak tree, as it happens, is the oldest tree in sight. Does the dog think that the cat went up the oldest tree in sight? Or that the cat went up the same tree it went up the last time the dog chased it? It is hard to make sense of the questions. But then it does not seem possible to distinguish between quite different things the dog might be said to believe.

One way of telling that we are attributing a propositional attitude is by noting that the sentences we use to do the attributing may change from true to false if, in the words that pick out the object of the attitude, we substitute for some referring expression another expression that refers to the same thing. The belief that the cat went up that oak tree is not the same belief as the belief that the cat went up the oldest tree in sight. If we use words like ‘believe’, ‘think’, ‘intend’ while dropping the feature of semantic opacity, we are not using those words to attribute propositional attitudes. For it has long been recognized that semantic opacity distinguishes talk about propositional attitudes from talk of other things.

Someone may suggest that the position occupied by the expression ‘that oak tree’ in the sentence ‘The dog thinks the cat went up that oak tree’ is, in Quine’s terminology, transparent. The right way to put the dog’s belief (the suggestion continues) is ‘The dog thinks, with respect to that oak tree, that the cat went up it’ or ‘That oak tree is the one the dog thinks the cat went up’. But such constructions, while they may relieve the attributer of the need to produce a description of the object that the believer would accept, nevertheless imply that there is some such description; the de re description picks out an object the believer could somehow pick out. In a popular if misleading idiom, the dog must believe, under some description of the tree, that the cat went up that tree. But what kind of description would suit the dog? For example, can the dog believe of an object that it is a tree? This would seem impossible unless we suppose the dog has many general beliefs about trees: that they are growing things, that they need soil and water, that they have leaves or needles, that they burn. There is no fixed list of things someone with the concept of a tree must believe, but without many general beliefs, there would be no reason to identify a belief as a belief about a tree, much less an oak tree. Similar considerations apply to the dog’s supposed thinking about the cat. — Donald Davidson, Rational Animals

Sure. But not Davidson, nor any one else under consideration here. Arn't we here considering only those who do attribute belief? — Banno

We were just talking about referential opacity. I told Bongo that we can't get that with behaviorism. He disagreed. Anyway, it just establishes that if we're using the term "opacity" we're in line with folk psychology that affirms full bodied propositional attitudes. We can't be talking about a deflated or reductive version of belief, because you don't get opacity with that.

I'm also curious about the implications of identifying with confidence what someone else believes. That's why I was asking how we know Lois believes x. Like, am I saying I'm a mind-reader? Am I employing charity? Is there any way to discover what she believes other than to be told by her?

Yes, and arguably neither is Superman in 'Lois is ready enough to say "Superman can fly"', that that sentence is not about Superman, but about something Lous says. I gather your behaviourist is not inferring any intentionality to Lous or to the parrot. Do you know of any one who proposes such an approach? — Banno

Like B.F. Skinner?

Behaviorism, the doctrine, is committed in its fullest and most complete sense to the truth of the following three sets of claims.

Psychology is the science of behavior. Psychology is not the science of the inner mind – as something other or different from behavior.

Behavior can be described and explained without making ultimate reference to mental events or to internal psychological processes. The sources of behavior are external (in the environment), not internal (in the mind, in the head).

In the course of theory development in psychology, if, somehow, mental terms or concepts are deployed in describing or explaining behavior, then either (a) these terms or concepts should be eliminated and replaced by behavioral terms or (b) they can and should be translated or paraphrased into behavioral concepts. — SEP

Also recall that in Superman III, corrupted Superman physically expels Clarke Kent from his body, who then proceeds to strangle him to death along with the de re/de facto distinction. — sime

:lol: