Do you agree that the philosopher must uphold, almost, a fiduciary duty towards the public, in terms of living a certain life? — Shawn

I think it depends on their philosophy.

- :up:

Wittgenstein refers to many of his contemporaries in his writings. He does not mention studying others. I think the Count's point about the depth of 'classical education' is germane. But it is a matter impossible to settle from text alone. — Paine

My source here was a review by Gregory Sadler that I watched after I joined TPF and desired to learn more about Wittgenstein. See, for example, 26:44. But maybe I conflated a lack of engagement with contemporaries with a lack of engagement with the wider philosophical tradition. My point is that perhaps it is no accident that Wittgenstenians struggle to interact with other kinds of philosophy, if Wittgenstein's work was not intended to interact with other philosophy.

---

For example, you have the three uses of "is." The "is of predication," the "is of identity," and the "is of existence." But in the history of philosophy, there is plenty of debate that might make one question how discrete these really are. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am also thinking about the thread on quantification, and the way that the Wittgenstenian view in that thread is self-referential and largely incapable of interacting with the large number of alternative views.

---

It's also the notion that if one just really parses out Wittgenstein's Koans (aphorisms or propositions), one will "get it".. One just has to interpret Wittgenstein to the best ability..

One can always chastise oneself for not knowing enough, and by not knowing enough, one is not "getting it fully".. But why wouldn't that same thing be for any other philosopher? — schopenhauer1

I don't think it can be said for any philosopher but I think it can be said for some. I think Plato is the epitome, for meditation on Plato's dialogues shows them to be fecund beyond belief. I don't see any of that in Wittgenstein, and as I have learned more about his methodology I think I have begun to understand why it isn't there. But maybe I should try reading him again.

IIRC from some biographical thing I read he never bothered to read Aristotle in his lifetime. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is also well-known that he never bothered to read his fellow contemporary philosophers, and that he had a tendency to use past philosophers simply as leverage for his own thought. Maybe all of these pieces of the puzzle fit together in an obvious way. Maybe he was self-absorbed.

Antonia Soulez (sorry, I cannot find a public link to it) makes interesting observations that Wittgenstein's references to Plato, Kant, Russell, etcetera are not designed to solve their problems but as instances of what concerns his views and development. That suggests a conscious departure from the "philosophy of history" discussion.

Some have made that departure to be a parting shot, an assassination in Deleuze's view or a trip to the couch for various expressions of "therapy."

As an opponent of the means of 'natural sciences" to explain everything, I think it is helpful to compare Wittgenstein to others who did something seemingly similar but chose to wear the ermine of The Philosopher of History.

Heidegger is the true antipode to Wittgenstein. — Paine

Thanks, very interesting. :up:
This all makes sense to me.

I would question whether this is a particularly helpful or good faith way to pose the question. — Count Timothy von Icarus

He's frustrated and he's posting out of frustration, but in this case I think there is a legitimate reason for the frustration. Perhaps it's okay to exorcise the Wittgenstenianism of the forum, if it truly is getting out of control. I want to say that whenever excessive gatekeeping occurs on a public forum it should be checked, and unfortunately the checks that occur naturally are also somewhat infelicitous. Maybe that's okay.

It seems like Wittgenstein's work is inherently resistant to interaction with the rest of philosophy. — Leontiskos

There are a lot of philosophers who are "in-house baseball," such that they are only accessible to those who have read them at some length (and this is particularly true of much of the continental tradition). There are others who are not enigmatic, and can be read profitably even by those who are unfamiliar with them. This latter group are most conducive to public philosophy forums.

Wittgenstein is a strange animal in that he appears to be publicly accessible, and his adherents genuinely believe that his thought will be easy to access. But then when someone less familiar with Wittgenstein starts reading him and asking obvious questions, the weather suddenly changes and Wittgenstein becomes this enigmatic figure whose thought one must be initiated into by special rituals. It seems to me that this is just a defense mechanism that intervenes whenever Wittgenstein looks to be wrong. To consider a real objection to Wittgenstein would require accepting the possibility that Wittgenstein's paradigm and presuppositions might be incomplete. It would require a mental distance where Wittgenstein and, say, Schopenhauer are placed on equal footing, and such things cannot be tolerated by those who are truly loyal to Wittgenstein!

The aphoristic style lends itself to people reading it like a prophet.. holy writ almost. — schopenhauer1

Yep. But there's also the strange juxtaposition with the analytic context, which is different from Nietzsche.

I mean... :yikes: — schopenhauer1

Usually thinkers have successors, but it seems like Wittgenstein doesn't have any clear-cut successors, perhaps because the meaning of his thought is not determinable. At that time in history there was a revolutionary attitude that swept through many disciplines, and also reached beyond academia. Wittgenstein strikes me as someone who was trying to be original, to such an extent that he becomes opaque and even somewhat mystical (again, almost like a guru).

- It seems like Wittgenstein's work is inherently resistant to interaction with the rest of philosophy. Thoughts?

- "People do things because they believe they should do things; therefore moral realism is false." Good stuff, Janus, good stuff. :roll:

Then you should realize there is no objective morality and stop pretending you have a theory or could have a theory of objective moral truth. — Janus

Your tautology has no relation to these other claims you are making. It's not clear you realize this, either.

I say this too because I notice a tendency whereby when you question Wittgenstein's ideas, the only answer that seems to be legitimate to the majority who jump on these threads is to quote another line from Wittgenstein.. As if you cannot refute Wittgenstein, you can only have varying levels of understanding of Wittgenstein. — schopenhauer1

:lol: You're not wrong.

Did you see my post <here>? Specifically the paper, "Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on Self and Object."

Help me understand why it is SPECIFICALLY Wittgenstein where I see this?? — schopenhauer1

I don't know that much about Wittgenstein, but I have noticed a lot of strange intransigence among those who rely heavily upon him. 'Thing is, historically speaking Wittgenstein's approach to philosophy is very weird and idiosyncratic, and when this is combined with gatekeeping what results is something that is comically absurd. There is something guru-ish about the whole phenomenon.

(Maybe this should be in the Lounge.)

People are motivated by their moral feelings and thoughts, but they may not always follow them. There is nothing tautologous in any of that. — Janus

It's little more than a barebones tautology. People are motivated by feelings and thoughts, obviously. Anyone who understands what feelings and thoughts are understands this.

I think the formalisations are thus red herrings in the discussion regarding quantifier variance. Since if even mathematical reasoning has both ambiguity and commonality regarding the underlying logic and its quantifier introduction rules, why would we expect logic to behave as more than a prop, crutch or model of quantification in natural language? Never mind ontology! — fdrake

Right, and that is why I think Sider's analysis is a great deal more incisive than Finn and Bueno's. For example, here is his shorter version of explaining what quantifier variance is:

Quantier variance: There is a class, C , containing many inferentially adequate candidate meanings, including two that we may call existence_PVI and existence_DKL. PVI’s claims are true when ‘exists’ means existence_PVI and DKL’s claims are true when ‘exists’ means existence_DKL. (Similarly, other views about composite material objects come out true under other members of C .) Further, no member of C carves the world at the joints better than the rest, and no other candidate meaning carves the world at the joints as well as any member of C —either because there is no such notion of carving at the joints that applies to candidate meanings, or because there is such a notion and C is maximal with respect to it. — Sider, Ontological Realism, p. 11

They are not tautologies; people don't have to be thus motivated. — Janus

I never said they did. The statements remain tautological. They are tautological conditionals (if/then statements).

I was interpreting this statement charitably, but I think that interpretation was incorrect:

They are binding socially (normatively) only insofar as most normal people hold to them. — Janus

What you mean to say is—simplifying even further to highlight the tautology—people do (moral) things because they believe they should do (moral) things. This doesn't say anything at all. It certainly doesn't amount to a moral theory.

People pray, for e.g., for safety while traveling, and if they arrive safely, then they believe their prayer was answered. What's bizarre is that any answer can fit within their beliefs about prayer. — Sam26

Why is that bizarre?

It's like the self-sealing argument, any outcome can fit within their belief. — Sam26

Prayer is not an argument.

The truth is there is no way to know if a particular outcome is from God, it could simply be chance or even deterministic. — Sam26

If God (of the classical variety) exists then all outcomes are from him. To say that it might be from God or it might be from something else is to misunderstand God.

More mundanely, if I ask someone to do something, and they are capable of doing it, and they receive my request, then any outcome will implicate a choice on their part. This isn't "bizarre," it's quite logical.

But prayer is asking God for something. Do they mean to say that God had decided I would recover slowly but, because THEY are asking, God will speed up my recovery? Do they think they are that important? Isn’t that egotism? — Art48

It is not egotism to petition an important or powerful person. Some petitions are motivated by egotism/pride, and some are not. If you have a reason other than pride to think that the petition is worthwhile, then you need not be egotistic. Christians do, and if you think impetration is egotistic, then Heaven knows what you think of the hypostatic union. :wink:

(The truly egotistic people don't bother with impetration. They just attempt to do it themselves.)

I seriously doubt it. QV seems to be the love-child of incommensurability and a bizarre over-promotion of the principle of charity. I don't know why I'm even posting, it's so stupid. — Srap Tasmaner

Isn't it wonderful that we can agree on things like this even while being at loggerheads on Hume and probabilistic logic? :grin:

FWIW, here first, which happens to be a post of mine you responded to, but I quoted it in the section responding to Banno, so understandable that you missed it. — Srap Tasmaner

So you haven't been reading my posts. Fine. — Banno

Ah, I actually did read those but I didn't realize at the time that a previously-uncited paper was being introduced.

Sorry. Eli Hirsch and Jared Warren, Quantifier Variance. — Srap Tasmaner

Ah okay. I think this is the first time that paper has been quoted in this thread. I don't think Sider's paper has been paid any attention at all.

I think part of the problem here is that we have been focused on a random paper that was not included in the OP, "Quantifier Variance Dissolved." The "titular topic" that speaks about is arguably not quantifier variance per se, and it surely isn't the presentation of quantifier variance found negatively in QVD. It seems to me that the OP is actually about Theodore Sider's thoughts in his paper, "Ontological Realism." This is what the OP draws most heavily upon. To expand the central quote from the OP:

But notice this: every serious theory of the world that anyone has ever considered employs a quantificational apparatus, from physics to mathematics to the social sciences to folk theories. Quantification is as indispensable as it gets. This is defeasible reason to think that we’re onto something, that quantificational structure is part of the objective structure of the world, just as the success of spacetime physics gives us reason to believe in objective spacetime structure.55 Questions framed in indispensable vocabulary are substantive; quantifiers are indispensable; ontology is framed using quantifiers; so ontology is substantive.

If you remain unconvinced and skeptical of ontology, what are your options?

First, you could reject the notion of objective structure altogether. I regard that as unthinkable.

Second, you could reject the idea of structure as applied to logic. I regard that as unmotivated.

Third, and more plausibly, you could accept the idea of structure as applied to logic, but deny that there is distinguished quantificational structure in particular. This is in effect quantifier variance, but there are some interesting subcases. . . — Sider, Ontological Realism, pp. 37-8

It seems to me that @Banno is opting for some variety of the third approach.

What does Sider mean by quantifier variance? He explains at some length beginning on page 8, and we have covered some of that same ground. On page 11 he gives a summation, and he seems to be much more careful than "Quantifier Variance Dissolved" in understanding this notion of quantifier variance. On page 11 he also begins his argument against @Banno's idea that the meaning of a quantifier is merely a matter of domain. On page 22 he begins arguing for what I have been arguing for, which I will call the "substantiveness" of quantifiers.

Their treatment of quantifiers is straightforwardly functionalist and unobjectionable — Srap Tasmaner

Who are "they"? :chin:

Seems to me that such equivocation is still about the domain. I think I showed that , above. Can you show otherwise? — Banno

I granted that and pointed out that there are two different kinds of domain differences: quantitative and qualitative. I gave at least three examples: the apple, the Jeep, and the nominalist. You haven't interacted with any of this.

Going back to the apple, the quantificational difference is over whether the imaged thing exists through the image. This is simultaneously a different understanding of quantification and a difference of domain. You have been begging the question by asserting that the domain difference is primary, and the different understanding of quantification is accidental or artificial (or, on a carefully placed definition, non-existent). Yet it is simply false to claim that domain differences are always primary and quantificational differences are always secondary or derivative, and Simpson's analysis of Wittgenstein shows this to be the case (because Wittgenstein's quantificational understanding is precisely what shaped his domain, not vice versa).

With the apple one might buddy up to pluralism and say, "Ah, well the difference is inconsequential. Use the quantifier-and-domain that let's Cézanne's apple exist or use the quantifier-and-domain that does not let it exist. It's all the same. There is no right or wrong way." Yet I wrote that example to @J because he is a Christian, and in Jewish and Christian history this was always a substantial question in relation to iconoclasm (beginning with the Hebrew commandment against images of God, and continuing with various iconoclastic controversies, but most pointedly for Christianity the Second Council of Nicea). So it is not necessarily inconsequential, and those who believe that a reality can truly manifest through an image (think Orthodox icon theology) are involved primarily in a quantificational commitment, and only secondarily in a domain-extension commitment. They quantify reality differently, namely because they quantify images differently. This has the effect of altering their domain, but the alteration of the domain is merely a consequence of the way that they catalogue reality. You can't just say, "Ah, well Orthodox Christians posit a larger domain, but they quantify icons the same way as a secular person quantifies a portrait." They surely do not do this, just as the nominalist and the universalist do not quantify reality in the same way (or the people who disagree over mereological composites, or possible worlds, etc.).

Can you set out why or how the analogy does not work? In what salient way is logic not a game of stipulation? — Banno

In what salient way is logic like chess? Why would we assume such a thing? Chess is just a made-up game we created to have some fun and amusement. Logic is at the very least supposed to substantially help us to interact with reality. These are not the same thing. "Why do bishops move diagonally?" Because we said so in a made-up game. "Why does modus ponens hold?" Because reality said so, whether we like it or not.

Why doesn't it matter how you quantify or which logic you use? Isn't that of the utmost import? That there are multiple logics does not imply that they are all of equal utility or applicability. Propositional logic will be of little help with modal issues, and modal logic might be overkill for propositional problems. Some art is involved in the selection of a logic to use. — Banno

If art is involved then we've moved beyond stipulation, and you should follow that string.

I've already said that individual moral feeling is motivating, and that communally shared moral feeling is doubly so. — Janus

So you want to say, "If you are positively disposed towards doing or not doing something, then you are in some sense motivated to do or not do it. And if you and a large group of other people are all positively disposed towards doing or not doing something, then you are even more motivated to do or not do it."

These are just tautologies, are they not? I don't see anything substantial being said.

I'm still wanting an example of where quantifier variation is not also domain variation. I don't think it can be done - quantifier variation just is domain variation — Banno

@fdrake has been consistently talking about intensional difference in quantifiers, namely by way of differing introduction and elimination rules.

I'm still wanting an example of where quantifier variation is not also domain variation. I don't think it can be done - quantifier variation just is domain variation — Banno

@fdrake has been consistently talking about intensional differences in quantifiers, namely by way of introduction and elimination rules for quantifiers.

You're not really addressing the issue in any clear or straightforward way.

1. Is a moral consensus in any way binding, yes or no?
2. If yes, then in virtue of what is it binding?

Do you have clear answers to either question?

Particularly, in PI Wittgenstein is equivocal about use defining meaning in all cases. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Okay, interesting.

I think you can lay some blame on Wittgenstein for the concept of aiming to reduce hard problems to "pseudo problems" though. If our goal becomes not to solve problems, but rather to dismiss them, we should not be surprised if problems begin to seem intractable. It is the difference between starting with the question: "how do I understand this?" and beginning with the assumption that the real question is: "why do I not need to understand this?" or "why is it impossible to understand this?" Perhaps some problems really are problems of language or pseudo problems. However, having discovered this, it will not do to view the aim of philosophy entirely as the project of discovering how problems are not really problems. It's a bit of the old: "discovering a hammer and deciding the world is made of nails." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, that makes sense to me.

I think the move to viewing philosophy as a sort of "therapy" does have some strong points. There is a sense in which much classical and medieval philosophy is practically oriented, itself a type of "therapy." The ideal philosopher from these eras is a saint, even in the pagan tradition (e.g. Porphyry's Pythagoras or Philostratus' Apollonius of Tyana). They are not ruled over or disordered by desires and passions. They do what is right and just. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is Wittgenstein's the idea that philosophy is therapy in the sense that it can properly order our desires and lives, or is it the idea that in recognizing that things we thought were problems are not really problems, a therapeutic resolution takes place?

For, what is "pragmatism," when the Good, the object of practical reason, is itself either something that must be created according to "pragmatic" concerns, or else is illusory? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, good.

I am not sure this is so obvious. What you think about the relationship between logic (or mathematics) and the world/being itself is going to affect what you think about the value of seeking further explanation here. The assumption that any digging here is redundant seems to carry with it its own assumptions. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I actually find the role that chess plays on this forum a bit bewildering. Sometimes it almost feels as if chess is the foundational hermeneutical key to all reality. Folks launch into chess examples as if it is the most obvious thing that "morality is like chess" () or "logic is like chess" () or "epistemology is like chess" (). The obvious rejoinder to this unspoken presupposition is simple, "No it's not." Things like morality, logic, and epistemology are not like chess; they are not just arbitrary games we made up for the fun of it. Their overlap with chess is quite small. These chess-claims usually function to underwrite some kind of arbitrary reasoning or foundation.

Is this just Wittgenstein playing out, with his assumptions that philosophy is the study of language and language is fundamentally a kind of "game"? These are two false assumptions which contain partial truths, and which fail badly as a foundation or first philosophy. As Aristotle points out, small errors in the beginning become large errors in the end. It seems to me that the attempt to massage them to make them more plausible tends to ignore their foundational-ness, as the thing which qualifies them never ends up being more foundational or pervasive than the metaphor itself, and because of this the metaphor continues, unperturbed and still largely false.

There is a way in which the answer to "Why do Bishops move diagonally?" is, that is just how the game is played, that its what we do. Seeking further explanation is redundant. — Banno

Logic is not just a stipulative game, like chess. The analogy doesn't work.

Could we change the way we use quantification in logic? Sure, why not. Indeed quantification is done slightly differently in each of the various logics. — Banno

And as I said, if you embrace logical pluralism then it doesn't matter how you quantify or which logic you use, for everything is stipulation and no one stipulation is any better than any other. Sider, @J, @Count Timothy von Icarus, and I all seem to agree that this is plainly wrong. I think you are entertaining it because you think the anchor problem is too messy to venture.

The way quantification works changes as the way the domain works. — Banno

To reiterate, this means that even within a single logic qualitative differences of domain reflect qualitatively different understandings of quantification. Disagreement can come down to these differences, and therefore (second-order) quantifier equivocation is possible.

Talk of nominalists and universalists seems oddly anachronistic. — Banno

It's not. Peirce was a universalist and Frege was a nominalist. The story only continues, and universals is but one of the many examples the paper gives.

Whatever point you are making remains unclear. — Banno

I've been quite clear:

I am seeing a bad argument against QV being made in the thread: <Quantifiers are not subject to second-order equivocation; therefore QV fails>. The problem is that this is valid but unsound, as the main premise is false. — Leontiskos

If you wish to talk of changes of domain as changes in quantification, go ahead, but that seems to me to obscure more than it reveals. — Banno

You like stipulation. If one does enough stipulation then quantifier equivocation becomes impossible. If you stipulate the logic and the domain, then the quantifier will be stable. But one does not understand quantification without understanding the qualitative scope of the domain, and the qualitative scope of the domain is only ever partially determined by the logic.

To reiterate some of the points you ignored: logic and quantification have changed throughout history, and are not immutable. Wittgenstein's understanding of quantification strongly influenced his domain and his philosophy (as does yours). Quantification changes in large ways throughout history and from logical system to logical system, and in smaller ways within a logical system given the presuppositions of the various logicians. This isn't odd, for quantifiers are part of language and all language is susceptible to such equivocation. You simply haven't provided a reason to believe otherwise. Presumably you would continue to offer the tautology that you do it your way because you do it your way, like "chess". The question is whether you have a reason to do it your way, or any one way rather than another.

They are binding socially (normatively) only insofar as most normal people hold to them. So, I am not advocating moral subjectivism or skepticism, but rather a kind of moral inter-subjectivism. What is morally wrong is what most people would find to be so. Of course, I don't deny that this position has its weaknesses, and I think these show up in the case of social mores, like sex before marriage, but when it comes to significant moral issues like murder, rape, child abuse, theft, and so on I think it works well enough. — Janus

The first sentence seems to rely on peer pressure for bindingness; the third sentence seems to rely on the idea that the consensus of a large enough sample of human opinion will tend to be correct (I forget the name which is often given to this idea). The problem with consensus-based views is that consensus is not in itself a truthmaker. The claim that consensus is a truthmaker for moral propositions therefore requires additional explanation.

If you want to say that moral proposition P is probably true if most people believe it, then you still need to explain why this makes it probably true.

Many years ago I argued with an atheist skeptic that a general consensus is rationally inclining: that it counts as evidence in favor of the thesis (and therefore global skepticism fails). I did not commit myself to the consensus constituting anything more than a piece of evidence, for he would not even accept this. I am inclined to agree with my former self, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that the rational inclination is strong enough to bind or obligate one to accept the opinion of the consensus. So what I said seems to apply to your theory as well:

I think the reason moral subjectivism is basically non-existent in professional philosophy is because it is recognized that even if nothing supports moral propositions better than attitudes, it remains the case that attitudes are insufficient to support moral propositions. — Leontiskos

Ergo: The attitude of belief that a consensus of people have towards a moral proposition is not sufficient to support that moral proposition. Unlike the subjectivist, I think your methodology contains a certain degree of validity, and mere consensus may even be sufficient for a child or an unreflective person, but beyond that I do not think it manages to properly ground moral propositions. Still, a lot of the ethical silliness on these boards would be improved by adopting your position (e.g. ).

Yes. I'd say that one can be a cognitivist without thinking that ethics is a cognitive science. I don't think ethics is a science. — Moliere

Okay, interesting.

Not with those words, no -- to be fair to you I'm trying to make a position mostly to understand the idea, so I'm changing my position as I go along; I'm engaged in a creative endeavor. I don't have some firmly worked out idea here, though through the game we have managed to touch upon some possible interesting avenues of conversation. — Moliere

Okay.

at least in the sense of using "wants to be". In the scenario where he acts on anger "X wants to be alpha", or perhaps something more personal like the person insulted his wife: "X wants to be defender"

Where he backs down "X wants to be friend" -- he's promised, and friends keep promises.

Where he's guilty "X wants to be accepted" — Moliere

Okay, in my last I set out different senses of such desires. Are you saying they are a sort of retrospective motive for an action that has already occurred?

Why not? — Moliere

It's just how reality works. If your mother gives birth to you, then you don't give birth to your mother.

Gravitation works that way. The earth pulls on the apple, and the apple pulls on the earth -- it's just the earth is bigger so it's a more noticeable pull, but they simultaneously cause each other to meet. — Moliere

Yes, but the motion is caused by the body, not by the motion of the body. There is no circular causality here, no more than if, sitting across from each other foot to foot, we grasp hands and pull each other up.

I'm appealing to his anger. It's the right kind of anger. The words we make up after the fact notice the distinction between the right kind and the wrong kind, but the words aren't the appeal. — Moliere

An appeal to the right kind of anger is not an appeal to anger itself. Else, if you think there is an emotion called good-anger and a different emotion called bad-anger, and these are two different things with no essential relation to one another, then you would still need to say what you mean by good-anger, and I say this description will always appeal to a rational justification for the appropriateness of good-anger.

But this might be back to philosophy of emotions. — Moliere

If you are interested, one of Aquinas' central writings on the passions occurs in questions 22-48 of the Prima Secundae.

Edit: Some old threads on emotion:

• Are emotions rational or irrational?
• How voluntary are emotions?
• Difference between thoughts and emotions?
• Does the West educate about emotions?
• How May the Nature and Experience of Emotions Be Considered Philosophically?

's thread is perhaps par for the course in that it conceives of emotions as separate from the self. I'm starting to wonder if this is just how modern people think.

I'm claiming that MS is consistent, at least, and making a steel-man attempt at making it plausible to its detractors. My pet theory is error theory just to put my cards out there, but I'm trying to think through the position and see if there's some way to render it coherent, and palatable to those on the other side as an example of the meta-ethic. — Moliere

Okay.

Capital-F Feelings are the truth-makers in this hypothetical meta-ethic. The sorts of examples I've given here are "X wants to be Y" -- the emotions arise because of the Feelings, to think of "emotions" as you do here: — Moliere

Have you given examples? I searched for "wants to be" on the first five pages on the thread and didn't find any occurrences.

I'd claim that when Jesus expels the money-changers from the temple that he is enacting a rationality because his anger is justified. — Moliere

But you aren't appealing to his anger, you are appealing to the justification of his anger, like I said <here>. This is not appeal to emotion; it is appeal to something which justifies an emotion.

"Calculus" is confusing on my part -- I just meant in the generic sense where logical symbol manipulation or the operations of a computer are also calculus -- so it need not even be numeric, and can even be a philosophical calculus rather than something truly mathematical. Spinoza's Ethics comes to mind here. — Moliere

Okay, but when I say "emotions don't do calculus" I am also saying that emotions don't do "logical symbol manipulation," or, "the operations of a computer," or, "philosophical calculus." Emotions don't do calculus in any of these senses.

Isn't the MS doing that?

Though I wouldn't do it for the MS position, I don't think ethics is a cognitive science either. Another reason a meta-ethics thread might be interesting. — Moliere

So you agree with me that your theory of emotion-subjectivism is not a (cognitive) science?

Couldn't it be both? Even for Plato -- if one is ruled by Passion then one would choose a Passionate ethic, just as the one who is ruled by Reason chooses the rational ethic, yes? — Moliere

Either the choice leads to the ethic or attachment to the ethic leads to the choice. It can't be both, because two things cannot simultaneously cause each other.

For Plato the one ruled by passion does not choose; passion is his master, and one enslaved to passion does not engage in rational choice (i.e. they do not engage in choice in obeying their master, only in carrying out his bidding). Contrariwise, the one who chooses is not "ruled by reason;" he is rational. Passion and reason are not for Plato parallel realities vis-a-vis enslavement or "rule." This is in line with common sense, for we do not say, "Don't get carried away by your reason!"

"I'm sorry, I won't do it again" or something like that works. The emotion would be guilt. The Feeling would be "I want to be accepted by my friends". — Moliere

I would say that neither of the quoted phrases are emotions or feelings. The first is a kind of promise and the second is the expression of a desire. But let's look at the latter quote:

(under the rendition that ought-statements are nothing more than this reduction to an is-statement of attachment, and an imperative, which is what my next chunk is on) — Moliere

I don't quite know what you meant by this, because I think a self-provided imperative is sufficient for an 'ought', and I don't think "an is-statement of attachment" is sufficient for an 'ought'.

Suppose you need to start drinking alcohol to be accepted by your friends. In that case you might say, "I want to be accepted by my friends, therefore I will drink alcohol" (non-hypothetical ought-judgment). Or you might say, "If I want to be accepted by my friends, then I should drink alcohol" (hypothetical ought-judgment). More realistically, you might say, "My friends will only accept me if I drink alcohol, so perhaps I should start drinking alcohol." The problem here is that your "Feeling" is equivocal, and the various senses over which it sprawls are the very senses that the debate is about.

More generally, "I want to be accepted by my friends" either represents/justifies a bona fide choice or else it does not. Someone might have started drinking alcohol years ago, and when asked why they did so, they might say, retrospectively, "I suppose I wanted to be accepted by my friends." In this case their desire explains their behavior, and Aristotle would call their subsequent drinking volitional but not deliberate (i.e. not chosen). On the other hand, someone might have made a deliberate decision to start drinking in order to be accepted by their friends. The three cases I offered just above relate to this possibility. But when you want to talk about the 'Feeling' of "I want to be accepted by my friends," there are a large variety of things that you could be talking about.

Do you see how this isn't a divorce of reason from emotion? — Moliere

Yes, more or less, but I believe the initial reason you posited emotion-subjectivism is because you did not want to bear the burden of justification that rational approaches require. So if we talk about "emotion" then we don't need to rationally justify our emotion, but if that same emotion can be a truth-maker for moral propositions then we can have our cake and eat it, too. We can avoid the pesky problems of rational justification while simultaneously possessing good reasons for our truth-claims. By reintroducing reason you reintroduce the onus of justification.

To be frank, I think moral subjectivism is goofy. I don't think professional philosophers hold it. It is no coincidence that there is no SEP or IEP article on it. I won't name names, but there are a handful of people on this forum who try to hold it. Bob Ross gave it up: good for him. Janus is distancing himself from it: good for him. I don't think charity requires us to prop up a theory without legs, lol.

Feelings are attachments to people, things, ideals, propositions, states of mind, patterns, and, in some cases, morals. And I've also allowed that "Feelings" may be collective, in some sense, to accommodate things like legal and collective -- not just individual -- moral rules. It seems to me that this must be the motivation for the MS position because they want to retain that some moral propositions are true in the way that it's intuitively felt, but don't believe there is an objective science or something along those lines. — Moliere

I think moral subjectivists do not see any way that moral propositions can be true or false, but they find this result unintuitive and so they engage in hand-waving and end up abusing language in the process. For example, the moral subjectivist wishes to have a notion of "truth" that is unverifiable and is not averse to contradiction. Of course such a thing is not truth at all. To say that everyone has subjective states which adequately ground truth-claims, even when these truth-claims all contradict one another, is not to be speaking about truth in any legitimate sense.

And another reason for a thread on the philosophy of emotion. — Moliere

I think it would be a more interesting topic. :up:

To lay my cards on the table, I don't really want to argue over a thesis that you don't hold, especially when that thesis has no authorities to legitimate it. It doesn't seem to me that it will be fruitful. I would rather talk about a thesis that you actually hold, such as error theory or a theory of emotion or a theory of moral 'oughts', etc. It would be different if the thesis had philosophical authorities behind it, but I don't see that moral subjectivism does. Of course, your attempt to salvage moral subjectivism has been admirable in certain ways, but I don't think it is ultimately salvageable, and given that you don't actually hold to the theory, you must not think that the arguments you are giving are that good. :wink: Plus if I let you go on there is the dangerous possibility that you actually talk yourself into this thing. :joke:

I am basically arguing:

P1: Ss relate to Ps in manner R.
P2: All Bs are Ss.
C: Bs relate to Ps in manner R. — Bob Ross

Right, and the OP itself is clear that beliefs are one kind of stance (P2). My point to @Moliere earlier was that cognitive feelings of the sort he has in mind would seem to just be another kind of stance:

P1: A stance taken on the trueness or falseness of something, is independent of the trueness or falseness of that something.
P2: A feeling is a (cognitive) stance taken on the trueness or falseness of a proposition.
C1: Therefore, a feeling about a proposition cannot make that proposition true or false.

P3: Feelings make moral propositions true or false.
P4: C1 and P3 being true are logically contradictory.
C2: Therefore, moral subjectivism is internally inconsistent. — Leontiskos

You can just as easily turn all of truth into another pseudo problem, something that is merely defined by a game that "works"—something that both defies and needs no metaphysical explanation. But when we reach a point where Goodness, Truth, our words, and now even our own conciousness itself have all been "eliminated" or "deflated," so as to avoid pseudo problems, things start to look a lot like Protagoras (or at least Plato's caricature of him). If it's games and feelings of usefulness all the way down, no one can ever be wrong about anything — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, good.

Reason is fundamentally the capacity to be aware of or to know whatever there is to be aware of or to be known, and to order actions, traits of character, emotions accordingly. Reason’s range is only limited by the range of knowables. If one confines the knowable to the scientific or the mathematical, one is left with a pretty narrow idea of reason.[10] Paradoxically it is those who most object to reason in this sense who also do most to preserve it, for they are operating precisely with this notion of reason when they reject it as too narrow to capture or to base the fullness of the human being. So they say, for instance, that beauty, goodness, dignity, and so on are not part of reason because they are not knowable—they are objects of feeling or imagination or intuition or something of the sort. Thus they reinforce the relegation of reason to the hard ‘objective’ reason of modern natural science. But this cannot be the notion of reason that Boethius is using, for this narrowing of reason is a phenomenon of post-medieval philosophy. The ‘reason’ of the classical tradition is as much involved with the beautiful, the good, the lovely, and things loved (for reason in some sense loves its objects, at least to the extent they are lovable), as it is with the mathematical or ‘factual’; indeed perhaps even more so.11 It is reason that brings about the fullness of the human being because it opens up persons to the fullness of what is; without it emotions and feelings and intuitions would be blind or empty.

[10] Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is a locus classicus here. Of course he did not think that the objects of science and mathematics were the most important or the only things. But he did, in the Tractatus, think they were the only things, besides logic, one could reason and talk about. On the other hand the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle and the A. J. Ayer of Language, Truth and Logic thought not only this but also that science, mathematics and logic were the only things simply. They lacked Wittgenstein’s mysticism. — Peter L. P. Simpson, The Definition of Person: Boethius Revisited, p. 6

---

I almost posted about this the other day, but decided I didn't care enough. This charity metasemantics they've cooked up, I mean, it's the sort of crap mainstream (analytic) philosophy has been getting up to for a long time. It's depressing. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I agree. Good post.

But it's toward the end there that I disagree. Yes ratiocination rests on something that isn't that, but I wouldn't call what it rests on intellection, which seems to suggest something like the grasping of self-evident truth, or something. — Srap Tasmaner

Not self-evident, but immediate. If knowledge (scientia) is truly possible via logical syllogism, then the “atomic” simples that logic presupposes must be known immediately (non-discursively). I am posting some quotes from Peter Simpson because I accidentally stumbled upon a paper where he discusses Wittgenstein’s use of Frege’s logic as leading Wittgenstein to “treat formal logic as a mirror of the world” (“Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on Self and Object”). So I looked through his works for related topics, and this paper comes close to our topic:

Turning to the question of the nature of mind first, it becomes clear in the De Anima that mind is able to abstract because it is active as well as passive. What is latent in particular things is brought to life, so to speak, and imprinted on the mind by the mind itself. Aristotle resorts to an analogy with light to explain this. As colors are not seen unless light first falls on them and makes them visible, so the universal natures are not seen in the particulars unless the light of the mind falls on them and makes them knowable. Now it is worth noting that one of the results which may be said to emerge from the debate about innate knowledge between Descartes and Locke, is that one cannot get out of sensible experience by itself all that is grasped by thought; some input beyond mere sensation is required. Aristotle would agree with this, but not with Descartes that that input takes the form of actual knowledge, nor with Kant that it takes the form of a priori concepts, nor indeed with Wittgenstein and others that it takes the form of the social and linguistic context; rather it takes the form of a different faculty or power that is endowed with its own distinct principle of activity (what medieval writers used to call its own “intelligible light”), which does not work by adding to the content of sensible experience (as the other solutions do), but by enabling more of what is already there to be taken out. — Peter L. P. Simpson, The Nature and Origin of Ideas: The Controversy over Innate Ideas Reconsidered, pp. 22-3

See also Simpson’s, “The Rejection of Skepticism,” and “Waking Realism,” and Stromberg’s, "An Essay on Experimentum," This is all somewhat related to 's point about Plato’s divided line.

Simpson’s primary interest is moral and political philosophy, but he sees the same thing there that you point to in analytic philosophy. For example, he notes that Rawls’ thinking is axiomatic, and ends in a blind appeal to current cultural intuitions. It is not pure stipulation in that it appeals to cultural intuitions, but it explicitly abstains from attempting to rationally justify those intuitions. The “input” for democratic thinking is consensus.

Instead, as you know, I'm with Hume... — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, and I am very much against Hume.

So yes, I'm inclined to agree that there is a sort of fatal flaw in much modern philosophy -- the pointless and unrealistic model building like we see here -- and that it can diagnosed as a failure to understand what the foundation of reasoning really is, but I see that foundation quite differently. — Srap Tasmaner

It seems like we are both reticent to get into a long conversation, but are you saying that everything should be simplified in favor of a simpler, probabilistic theory? What seems to be in question is that “input” that Simpson speaks of. I want to say that logic works quite well, and yet seems to be left hanging ten feet from the ground. The difficulty is anchoring it, filling in those last ten feet. I don’t find “probability” to be a great anchor, but I’m not sure how far we want to get into this.

The joke was quite intentional. — Banno

Okay, but the joke sidestepped the question. Are there advances in logic? Do these advances include advances in quantification? Once we begin to understand the history of logic we understand that advances in quantification are some of the most important kind. Your claims seem to commit you to the odd opinion that modern formal logic and its theory of quantification are eternal and unchanging. I think I spoke about idolatry earlier. :wink:

This is not an example of quantifier variance. It is a disagreement as to the domain. — Banno

I think you are failing to recognize just how stipulative/tautological your approach to this question is. You have defined away quantificational disputes, but does your definition have any real basis?

The existential quantifier plays out as a disjunct of the domain. List all the items in the domain, and if any one of them is an apple, then the existential quantifier will be true. — Banno

There is a close relation between quantification and the domain. So close, in fact, that to merely stipulate that every dispute about quantification is really only a dispute about the domain is a petitio principii. One person will say, “X is not in the domain and therefore cannot be quantified over,” and another person will say, “X cannot be quantified over and therefore is not in the domain.” An alternative understanding of quantification will result in a different domain, but a different domain need not necessarily result in an alternative understanding of quantification. I gave two examples: the unicorn and the Jeep (). The point is that there are two different kinds of differences of domain: merely quantitative differences and qualitative differences. A (merely) quantitative difference of domain results in an artificial difference of quantifier-qua-extension. For example, if one attempts to quantify over all mammals but omits unicorns because they were not known to exist (or vice versa) then a quantitative difference of domain results in a merely artificial difference of quantifier-qua-extension. But if one attempts to quantify over all things but omits universals because they are a nominalist (cf. QVD 295) then a qualitative difference of domain results in a substantial difference of quantifier-qua-extension. What we are concerned with are qualitative differences of domain, not merely quantitative differences of domain, and these qualitative differences of domain are what imply qualitative quantificational differences.

The nominalist and the “universalist” think about the contents of reality in a fundamentally different way, and because of this they quantify reality in a fundamentally different way. It is inaccurate to merely chalk this up to domain, as if radically different domains do not entail radically different quantifiers. In order to ignore this one would need to hold that quantification over a name or thing is the same as quantification over a universal, and this is untenable. As soon as we move beyond an empiricist domain and introduce different modes of being we also move beyond quantifier univocity. To ignore this is to beg the question in favor of empiricism, and obviously this will not do since the debates that the OP envisions can obviously take place between empiricists and non-empiricists. When we are thinking in this deeper sense of domain, quantifier and domain go hand in hand. We could artificially define one to encompass the other, but in reality they are two subtly different things that shift together.

Beyond that, I think that you are defining quantifiers in accord with your predilection for stipulation, and in turn with ontological pluralism. If domain were stipulative and arbitrary then quantification would be univocal, as you say (and this unique understanding of logic brings with it its own unique understanding of quantification). Yet if Sider is right that domain is not stipulative and an ontological structure holds, then a correct ontology will co-implicate a correct understanding of quantification and logic, and an incorrect ontology will co-implicate an incorrect understanding of quantification and logic. As history attests, there are different kinds of quantification and different kinds of logic.

Simpson has a nice paper that ends up looking at the way Wittgenstein’s logical inheritance from Frege leads him to to conclude that:

The self is pure medium, pure mirror for the world; their limits coincide. The self is, in a sense, one with the world. It gives way to it. Solipsism collapses into realism. — Peter L. P. Simpson, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on Self and Object, p. 10

Earlier:

The decisive role that modern formal logic is playing in Wittgenstein’s thought here can be illustrated also by reference to his account of names and objects. This itself follows from modern logic’s theory of quantification (invented by Frege), and Russell’s theory of descriptions. . . — Peter L. P. Simpson, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on Self and Object, p. 7

The nice thing about someone like Simpson is that he studied more than a few decades of the history of philosophy. Simpson’s point means that not only is modern logic’s theory of quantification substantial, involving its own presuppositions, but that theory of quantification is precisely what led Wittgenstein to some of his errors, such as his exclusion of dynamism from ontology. This absence of dynamism is a good example of a qualitative difference of domain that goes hand in hand with a specific theory of quantification. In Wittgenstein’s case it was his theory of quantification that led to his ontological error. :kiss:

The reason you see modern quantification as invisible, unimpeachable, and inescapable is because it is the water you swim in as someone embedded in the modern paradigm. Yet the more one contextualizes that paradigm, the more visible and contentful Fregian quantification becomes. In a hundred years it will be even more cleanly delineated in its historical context.

Maybe it helps to try to imagine a whole new vocabulary that we could use to describe said structure. Some areas get called “Gorp”, others “Vulp”, others “Cheeb”. These areas are, let’s say, definable in terms of their structural relations to each other – terms that would include “fundamentality” and “necessitation” – and are discoverable, and people can be right or wrong about which is which. So we lay out our map. Now the question is, “Which of those areas match with the terms ‛exist’, ‛real’, and ‛object’?” (There might be many more key structural elements; choosing three is just for purposes of example.) This is where the seemingly endless debate begins. But I think we need to get clear that a debate about terms is not a debate about structure, and it doesn’t follow that doubting privileged terms is the same as doubting privileged structure. — J

If we are thinking about the intractable "metametaphysical" disputes that you seem to have in mind, then suppose someone calls an area a Gorp and another disagrees and calls it a Vulp. If second-order equivocation is occurring (a terminological or conceptual difference) then there may be only an artificial disagreement, not a substantial disagreement. But if second-order equivocation is not occurring then there would seem to be a substantial disagreement. When one person says, "This is a Gorp," and another says, "No, it is a Vulp," they are disagreeing on what exists in that area. If we are to exclude ontological pluralism, then the dispute is over what actually exists.

What isn’t privileged is the terms associated with that structure -- not even seemingly rock-bottom terms like "exist". — J

Concepts are important, not terms, and I would say that the concept of existence is "privileged." If one person says, "A Gorp exists in this area," and another person says, "No, a Gorp does not exist in that area," then in order for the disagreement to be substantial the concept of existence must be common between the two speakers. Furthermore, in order for ontological structure to exist, there must be a true and normative understanding of existence. To say that no one concept of existence is any truer than any other is to fall into pluralism, and to close oneself off from the possibility of a true ontological structure.

What follows is something I wrote after thinking about your claim about the mereological composite alongside the other things I know about your background.

---

I am wondering if you are laboring under the now common assumption that reason is nothing more than discursive reason. In writing my thread on the breadth of the moral sphere I was attempting to rectify a common and radical moral error that lies at the root of so much moral confusion. If I were to do the same thing in attempting to rectify a common and radical error about the nature of the human intellect, I would write a thread about the idea that not all truth is known discursively. In fact when I first came to TPF I chipped at this problem here and there.*

To take an example, consider the proposition that 2+2=4. If someone does not understand this proposition or disagrees with it it is fairly easy to explain it, precisely because there is a discursive process by which we come to know this truth. We can break it down into (1+1)+(1+1)=4, and if more is required we can show that 1+1=2, 2+1=3, and 3+1=4. All of these steps are discursively accessible. But the simplest steps are not discursive, such as understanding the nature of unity (“1”), or understanding the nature of succession or combination. If someone does not understand these things then the base, 1+1=2, will not be accessible; and if these simple, atomic pieces of knowledge are not known (what Aristotle calls first principles) then there is no base for the discursive knowledge to build on, and 2+2=4 will be inaccessible.

Someone who thinks that all truth is known discursively will believe that discursive-syllogistic explanation is always possible, and that where such explanation fails knowledge does not exist. So they will think that if discursive-syllogistic adjudication fails in the case of claims about the existence of mereological composites, then knowledge of such a thing is not possible (i.e. it is not truth-apt). Or that if the basis of arithmetic, such as the existence of unity and succession, is not amenable to discursive-syllogistic demonstration, then arithmetic truths such as 2+2=4 will not be knowable (prescinding for the moment from the ontology of number).

More succinctly, the modern reduction of the intellect to ratiocination or discursive reason is reflected by the idea, “If you cannot explain how you know something, then you cannot know it.” I believe this is largely a result of the democratization and pragmatization of reason, where questions of consensus and therefore adjudication become supreme. But it is also a result of the Baconian manipulation of nature and the ascendency of science and logic (note that discursive-syllogistic reason is just logic). Habermas' understanding of reason as pragmatic also seems to be at play. The obvious problem with this, as Aristotle notes, is that logical demonstration is not self-supporting. Logical demonstration presupposes simple or primitive truths in order to get off the ground.* What this means is that someone who says they know something that cannot be explained is not necessarily a charlatan when that “something” is a first principle or a simple truth.** To claim otherwise would be to cut off the branch on which knowledge and logic rest.

So when you say that the dispute about the mereological composite must come down to conceptual or terminological equivocation, it is possible that you are drawing this false dilemma because you think that explanation must reign all the way down, like turtles. This is inextricably bound up with reducing human reason to discursive reason or logic, even though your motivation comes from what I would call the democratic turn. As I have learned in trying to explain this in the past, it is often very difficult for someone subsumed in modernity to grasp the fact that ratiocination presupposes intellection (that discursive reason presupposes non-discursive acts of the intellect). Even once it is grasped, working out the implications is a gradual process.

(One way to see this is to observe the way that modern logicians wish to make stipulation and axiom the king of the hill. Doing such a thing is like donning a blindfold to avoid looking at the glaring problem of how ratiocination (logic) could ever function or have any traction on the real world in the absence of intellection.)

* Some of my posts related to the topic: one, two, three. Cf. Aristotelian Non-discursive Reasoning (IEP)

** Strictly speaking it is not the truth which is simple but the means by which it is known (intellection). Truths are always simple, even though English philosophy is more quantitatively concerned with sound propositions than mere truths.

I'm sure you're not saying that there is a plain fact of the matter as to whether mereological items or universals exist, but I admit that I'm not sure just what you are saying. — J

I am saying that to claim that a dispute over [mereological composites] must be either conceptual or terminological is to ignore the possibility that it might be substantial, a dispute of "fact" or truth. It is to ignore the possibility that one person might be right and the other might be wrong about what they are intending to claim. This is another instance of the sort of relativism that Nagel generally opposes in The Last Word, for the legitimacy of the two philosophers' first-order arguments are precisely what is being dismissed when one thinks it could only be a conceptual or terminological dispute. Conceptual-or-terminological is a second-order reduction.

(And for the record, this isn't about skepticism concerning everyday objects. It's about how to divvy up metaphysical structure.) — J

If one person is right about how to divvy up metaphysical structure and the other person is wrong, then the dispute is not merely conceptual or terminological. In that case pluralism is false and Sider is correct that there is a true ontological structure. I would guess that Sider is not saying that every dispute must be substantial, but that he is saying that it is false to claim, "There is no ontological structure and therefore all of these ontological disputes are merely matters of communication breakdown."

The latter being these type 1 propositions. If ethical reasoning concerns and pertains to type 1 propositions then ethical reasoning is like mathematical reasoning. — Fooloso4

Nah, and it's hard to believe that you are even trying to interpret me correctly. The post is <here>. I was obviously using the example of 2+2=4 because Bob Ross had already been using it, not because I think ethics is the same as mathematics. The rather obvious point of that post is that ethical claims are about ethical truths, not beliefs (or beliefs about ethical truths). To read that post and assume that I think ethics is like mathematics is bizarre, and lazy.

Your premise that the activity of ethical reasoning is like mathematical reasoning is an opinion, a belief. — Fooloso4

'Never said it was. :roll:

There's a lot here, and in your recent previous posts. — J

Yeah, sorry about that. If I do end up getting away I wanted to leave some wood on the fire.

I would have thought "first-order equivocation" would be "the classic sense of two people talking past each other because they use [the same] words differently," but maybe that's not what you mean. — J

Right, I am calling that second-order equivocation. As I said above, equivocation in the standard (first-order) sense has to do with a single frame or speaker using a term in two different senses. Ergo:

In logic, equivocation ("calling two different things by the same name") is an informal fallacy resulting from the use of a particular word/expression in multiple senses within an argument.

[...]

Since only man [human] is rational.
And no woman is a man [male].
Therefore, no woman is rational. — Wikipedia | Equivocation

Or:

<Banks contain money; the river has banks; therefore the river contains money> — Leontiskos

Is there any "second-order equivocation" going on in the example I originally gave from Sider? — J

What Sider calls "talking past each other" is a form of second-order equivocation. Sider's example is the opposite, where instead of two people having one word with two senses, they have two words with one sense ("number"="fish"). In this case the two will think they are saying different things when they are really saying the same thing. In the case of second-order equivocation they will think they are saying the same thing when they are really saying two different things.

If I say “mereological composites exist” and you say “there is no such thing as a mereological composite”, which kind of dispute is going on? Are we disagreeing about concepts, while using the same words? Or are we holding the concept of “existence” steady, while (someone is) making a mistake in terminology? — J

The prima facie answer is that it is neither, and that a factual disagreement is taking place. At the root are disagreements of fact, such as disagreements over the maximal domain or disagreements over ontological structure. To simply assume that disagreements of fact are impossible is to have begged the question in favor of pluralism or Sider's, “in essence, quantifier variance.”

The first part of my response can be found here:

But we don't have the calculus of attachment just yet. — Moliere

How do you know? — Moliere

The point here is that whatever it is that establishes the hierarchy, it isn't emotion. Emotion does not do calculus. I am convinced that reason establishes the hierarchy, but I am content with the claim that whatever it is, it isn't emotion. This reduced claim seems sufficient to overcome emotion-subjectivism.

If the truth of all moral language just is the day-to-day operations of living, though, then I think emotions are exactly how hierarchies are established. Fear, guilt, and shame are powerful motivators in moral codes, and they are reinforced by social hierarchies established by emotional attachments. — Moliere

I think this misses the point I have already made about emotion-as-sign vs. emotion-as-cause. To claim that ethics is just emotion-conditioning would be to reject ethics as a cognitive science. "I act this way because my emotions determine me, and my emotions are determined by the conditioning that my parents and society imposed, and their emotions were determined by the conditioning that was imposed upon them, ad infinitum." This is more a theory of emotional determinism than a theory of ethics, and as such it destroys the agency of the human being (as already noted). Ethics involves making choices, not just being pulled around by emotions.

a person who is surrounded by people who shame them can feel guilt for that particular thing and want to change, or they can feel anger and define themselves against that group, and perhaps they can feel both at the same time in roughly similar proportion (and this is where the sense of free will comes from). Each leads to a kind of articulatable ethic that justifies the choice, so it really would depend upon whether or not the person is attached to this or that ethic if they speak the truth — Moliere

There is causal confusion at play, here. Does the choice lead to the ethic, or does attachment to the ethic lead to the choice? I think the cognitive aspect of ethics is again being trampled, especially if the attachment leads to the choice. Plato would say that reason (choice, deliberation) can be subordinated to the passions, but that this is a form of passion-tyranny.

In our example the man wouldn't say "One ought not lose their temper" -- that's goofy as hell for someone to say when they are contrite or angry or whatever genuine expression towards an ethic, and a real person's utterance would express this proposition differently. "One ought not lose their temper" is the proposition which the utterance can be reduced to, for the purposes of making the MS position philosophically palatable... — Moliere

But what is the "utterance" which can be reduced to, "One ought not lose their temper"? On your theory of emotion-subjectivism an emotion is supposedly translated into moral propositions of this sort, but I'm still waiting for you to cash out this claim that the emotion is the truth-maker for the moral proposition. Prima facie, the claim doesn't make any sense. What is the emotion that translates into the moral proposition, "One ought not lose their temper"?

The redemption story is one of recognition, shame, anger, and relief. The cognitive part is all the philosophy, but the reason people seek redemption isn't because of the cognitive part. — Moliere

You worried that I am divorcing reason from emotion, but here it seems that you are the one doing that. You contrast four things with philosophy/the cognitive part and assume that they are devoid of reason: recognition, shame, anger, and relief. I don't think emotions are separable from reason in this way. See for example my analysis of fear <here>.

Looking at the wiki definition ---

Ethical subjectivism (also known as moral subjectivism and moral non-objectivism)[1] is the meta-ethical view which claims that:

(1) Ethical sentences express propositions.
(2) Some such propositions are true.
(3) The truth or falsity of such propositions is ineliminably dependent on the (actual or hypothetical) attitudes of people.[2][3]



3's the proposition under dispute for you, I believe. — Moliere

Yep. :up:

So for any true ethical proposition the MS would try to demonstrate that its truth is dependent upon the attitudes of people, and the same with any false ethical proposition. — Moliere

Yes, or that given the attitude we are to infer the truth of the proposition.

I think the plausible part of the meta-ethic is that statements of ethics have practical, relational components when they are being followed so there is a sense, if all ethical statements are social creeds and nothing else, then the truth of them, if ethical statements are cognitive, would have to depend upon the attitudes of people because what else is there? — Moliere

I think a shift is occurring here. Instead of trying to support moral propositions in the way that standard ethics does, the moral subjectivist turns to abductive ethical reasoning and combines it with the assumption that whatever best supports moral propositions, sufficiently supports moral propositions. I think the reason moral subjectivism is basically non-existent in professional philosophy is because it is recognized that even if nothing supports moral propositions better than attitudes, it remains the case that attitudes are insufficient to support moral propositions. In that case one turns away from moral cognitivism and classical ethics. (Cf. @Janus)

(Out for a few days)