I don't know, being that Aristotle was a zoologist (maybe first and foremost), I think he was talking about what later we would know as genetics, so Greeks would have immutably what makes them suited to ruling. — Lionino

Well genetics are not immutable, but here is the crux of the matter:

Aristotle says that Greeks are fit to rule because they have x, y, and z characteristics. He does not say that Greeks are fit to rule because they are Greek.

Now "anti-racists" have a difficult time even with saying that Greeks are fit to rule because they have x, y, and z characteristics, and this is because the "anti-racist" holds to a dogma which says that no race or people has any characteristic which makes it better, in any way, than any other race or people. I think that's the long and short of it: an anti-racist dogma comes up against an empirical argument. I would say that, in principle, the dogma loses every time, and that the best arguments against racism are not dogmatic, a priori arguments. We can go further and say that when anti-racism becomes dogmatic it carries itself over into irrationality, even though it is politically incorrect to say so. I don't oppose morality, but this is one of the many examples of a moralistic position falling into irrationality.

I think that is a bit unspecific. — Lionino

Perhaps, but less unspecific than the original objection, which was my aim.

it would then be puzzling why Aristotle said that Greeks are suited to rule the world and thus the strong savages to the North as well as the effeminate intellectuals to the South to be ruled, as we can't change our race — immutable. — Lionino

Greeks are not immutably rulers. They need not have had the characteristics that made them good rulers, and they need not maintain those characteristics into the future. If there were something immutable or "biological" about Greeks being good rulers then none of this would be true.

How can another man's actions change the karmic situation of a person when dealing with his conscious. — Gregory

Aren't they denying personhood in humans in line with savage beliefs of old? — Gregory

To be free is to be the only one making the decision. — Gregory

It would be hard to overemphasize the foolishness of these ideas. The logical conclusion of the classically liberal notion of freedom is the idea that the actions of others cannot significantly influence another person or their situation. Someone who holds to such a rarefied version of liberty of course does not know what to make of any authentically communal event, including the act of making satisfaction for a group or community (Shoah, anyone?). But they also don't know what to make of the dependence of children on their parents; the duties of community, including family, town, and country; or even something as simple as fetal alcohol syndrome, murder, or the various other ways that individuals are drastically influenced by the actions of others. They don't know what to make of culture, or tradition, or even pregnancy. They struggle with the notion of giving advice or mentoring; they are bewildered by the notion of justified coercive force when it comes to, say, imprisonment. In short, they don't know what to make of reality, and they live in a fantasy land where freedom is whole and complete in each individual.

- I would suggest starting with a dictionary and then looking up 'atonement' and 'propitiation.' Maybe after that you will want to find a confessional source for what this or that group of Christians actually believe. It's hard to believe that you would write a thread without taking such steps.

Propitiation to my mind is a denial of free will. — Gregory

Propitiation is a denial of free will? I would love to hear an argument for such a claim. Whose free will is infringed? The one appeasing or the one appeased? lol...

On atonment, is not it crystal clear that someone cannot receive merits from someone else. How can another man's actions change the karmic situation of a person when dealing with his conscious. Again, this seems to be obvious to me. A person's moral state and repercussions are entirely in their own hands, no? Nevertheless the largest religion in the world believes otherwise. Again, what am i missing?? — Gregory

When it comes to vicarious satisfaction or atonement I would probably want to chip at the idea of monadic individualism. Things like reverencing and remembering ancestors, religious worship, and even things like Pure Land Buddhism all balk at this idea of monadic individualism. I am thinking specifically of "religious worship" of ancient times, where a polytheistic distribution of lands to certain gods obtained, and a people or geography was itself bound to a god (and then in turn to a king or ruler).

The idea that God allowed the forgiveness of guilt, the healing of man from within, to cost him the death of his Son has come to seem quite alien to us today. That the Lord “has borne our diseases and taken upon himself sorrows,” that “he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities,” and that “with his wounds we are healed” (Is 53:4–6) no longer seems plausible to us today. Militating against this, on one side, is the trivialization of evil in which we take refuge, despite the fact that at the very same time we treat the horrors of human history, especially of the most recent human history, as an irrefutable pretext for denying the existence of a good God and slandering his creature man. But the understanding of the great mystery of expiation is also blocked by our individualistic image of man. We can no longer grasp substitution because we think that every man is ensconced in himself alone. The fact that all individual beings are deeply interwoven and that all are encompassed in turn by the being of the One, the Incarnate Son, is something we are no longer capable of seeing. When we come to speak of Christ’s Crucifixion, we will have to take up these issues again. — Jesus of Nazareth, by Joseph Ratzinger, p. 159

For Aquinas' view, see his reply to objection 1 at ST III.48.2.

And maybe I am not your classical naturalist. If you take structuralism seriously, matter isn’t really very material when you get down to it. Even Aristotle’s prime matter or Anaximander’s Apeiron are a little too substantial. Plato’s Khôra isn’t right either but has something to recommend it. Somehow the material principle must be reduced to the purist notion of a potential. As in perhaps a Peircean vagueness or quantum foam. — apokrisis

Sure, and I don't really know enough about Peirce to engage these things. I tend to read Aristotle through Aquinas, although I recognize that in many ways Aristotle was the better philosopher.

Chance and necessity as the opposing limits defining the actuality we find sandwiched between these two limiting extremes.

Logos and flux would be another twist on the same thought. — apokrisis

Okay, but Logos also seems to be something different from both chance and necessity. Nevertheless, theism tends to be averse to the notion of fundamental flux, and this is at least one data point where classical theism clashes with a Peircean (and also an Aristotelian) model.

Well Peirce lived in a very theistic times. There was plenty of social pressure, and advantage, to frame things in that light. — apokrisis

But it is interesting that Peirce was not opposed to Medieval thought in the same way that modern science traditionally has been. For example, he read thinkers who his contemporaries were largely ignorant of, like Aquinas and especially Scotus. For this reason theistic semioticians like John Deely relate to Peirce in an entirely different way than they relate to scientists bound by modern thought.

And I don’t think a semiotic metaphysics in general could come across as clearly opposing an immanent kind of idealism or divine principle as - as I argued - it shouldn’t either stand for anything like an orthodox material account of Nature. It is poised in some metaphysical space of it own that sees both classical materialism and classical idealism as suffering from misplaced concretism and not tuned into the subtleties of Aristotelean hylomorphism as an argument. — apokrisis

Right, and it does not seem to be as agonistic and reactionary as many of the forces at work in modern science.

Well evolution is a pretty robust logical concept. How would you even prevent it happening in the sense that given a variety of possibilities, the most effective - in what ever sense that means - is going to win out.

Why else is physics so tied to the principle of least action? The path integral says every quantum event is a sum over a whole universe of possibilities. That’s a pretty dramatic application of Darwinian competition in its physicalist sense. — apokrisis

As I understand it, there are competing models that do not make such a strong use of the Darwinian principle of randomness or random mutation.

But considering the idea that the most effective possibility will win out, are we saying that what is known in a prior way to be most effective will in fact win out, or is "most effective" being defined as whatever ends up winning out? It is that dallying with necessitarianism which strikes me as odd, especially as a keystone for interpreting increasingly large swaths of reality. Teleology is becoming more and more acceptable, and yet the telos seems to always be up for grabs. Mechanistic science avoided the whole problem by turning a blind eye, but once teleology is admitted the idea of an ordering Intellect or Mover becomes more plausible.

To say that slaves are essential different from masters due to the kind of creature they are. One could justify saying "this person has a slavish soul" by saying "this person has bad habits that could change", which would be a psychological rather than a biological category. But Aristotle justifies it by tying it to their essence as creatures: their whole teleology is to be bound to a master who directs them in physical labor. — Moliere

Aristotle recognizes that the differences between the master and slave are generated by contingent factors. They are not somehow predetermined or immutable or necessary.

I'm guessing you're bound to a democratic/egalitarian argument where everyone is supposed to be equal, and any empirical inequalities must therefore be minor and superficial. But practically speaking this is a very difficult position to maintain, both because the empirical observations do not support it, and because when the democratic citizen votes they are required to discern good leaders from bad leaders. If there is no essential difference between one candidate and another, then why vote at all? And is it realistic to deny that there are at least two classes of adults: those who could make good leaders and those who could not?

I think what most trips up the modern democratic mind is that Aristotle holds that the natural slave prefers to be ruled by a natural master, in much the same way that the natural infantryman prefers to be ruled by a natural general. We have a notion that there are no natural slaves and that everyone is therefore fit to rule, and the consequences of this are nigh-comical. In that case, maybe the U.S. has received the presidential candidates it deserves.

For Aristotle the doctrine is eminently practical, and so to ignore the pragmatic reality on the ground while appealing to purely theoretical notions of "biological essences" is beside the point. What would a world with no natural slaves actually look like, and do we live in that world or not?

Lionino, I think our conversation went astray — Bob Ross

Yep, this seems right to me.

I don't see how, in that case, you could argue that (1) there is not intent to harm nor (2) that the intent is direct. — Bob Ross

Sure, I think that's a fair point.

I was meaning a causal means, like pulling a lever. Technically the gun, or my fist (in case of punching), is the means and the effect is the bullet harming the aggressor. — Bob Ross

Sure, but it is helpful to remember that causality does not track intention. To take a clearer example than the baseball bat, suppose someone applies a rear naked choke in self defense, and suppose that this does harm the aggressor but the defender is not aware of the harm involved. Have they used harm as a means?

An action is a volition of will; and as such cannot be analyzes independently of the per se intention behind it. — Bob Ross

Yes, I think that's exactly right.

The solution, I think, is to reject 3: I realized that my theory is eudaimonic and not hedonic, and so I am not committed to the idea that harming someone, in-itself, is bad for them. — Bob Ross

The OP raises subtle questions that probably cannot be solved in a single day or in a single thread. For a consequentialist the topic is fairly straightforward, but for a non-consequentialist it is more complicated. This is because most non-consequentialists recognize that consequences cannot simply be ignored. Harm in itself tends to be a consequence, and it is not obvious when the level of harm becomes morally relevant and when it does not. For Thomists it is the tricky question of when and how a circumstance can enter into the object of a moral act, and corrupt it.

Likewise, I find nothing wrong, now that I have liberated myself from 3, with deploying a principle of forfeiture whereby one can harm someone for the sake of preventing them from doing something wrong — Bob Ross

To press the complications, this would seem to be a case of deterrence, which is not the same as self-defense. This can be approached by noting that preventing precedes a bad act, whereas forfeiture follows after a bad act. At best we would say that a right is forfeited on account of some evil and manifest intent, and that use of force prevents the carrying out of that intent. Still, this more accurately describes the police officer than the private citizen who is merely concerned with self-defense. Self-preservation and prevention of wrongdoing are not the same thing, even though in some cases they interleave. Aquinas' article on blows is somewhat on point.

For me the heart of this thread is the question of the moral status of harm simpliciter. Supposing we have a duty to not harm or minimize harm, in what does this precisely consist? — Leontiskos

A preliminary takeaway is that harm does not necessarily invalidate an act, and yet it can invalidate an act. Specifically, if there is not a proper relation between the volitional act and the harm that ensues, then the harm will presumably invalidate the act. Still, to assess acts primarily in terms of harm is a preoccupation of democratic liberalism and consequentialism, and this way of assessing acts seems to be mistaken.

Can you justify this claim? Where do justifications bottom out? I'm probing the probing here. — unenlightened

The OP actually sets out two competing justifications for self-defense: double effect and forfeiture. In <this post> you gestured towards a forfeiture doctrine:

I might talk about a 'necessary mutuality' of moral behaviour, such that the thief forfeits his right to possess his own property — unenlightened

This makes it sound like we strip thieves of all property, which is not the case, and yet it seems to me that forfeiture justifications have a difficult time drawing that line. Nevertheless, this claim introduces two difficulties: punishment vs. defense and public vs. private. Classically these things are distinguished from one another. Defense is not necessarily punishment and punishment is not necessarily defense; and not everything that is available to a public authority is available to a private citizen.

Here is SEP's perspective:

On a standard view, the moral wrongness of killing and injuring is grounded in persons’ having stringent moral rights against such treatment. If defensive harming is at least sometimes morally permissible, it needs to be explained how the use of force can be consistent with these rights. Two broad types of justification are common in the literature.

The first holds that a person’s right against harm, though weighty, is not absolute and may be permissibly infringed if necessary to achieve a sufficiently important good. This is known as a lesser-evil justification.

...

[Second justification...] Instead, the permission to kill Attacker is explained by his lack of a right not to be killed in the circumstances. This is known as a liability justification for harming. — Self-Defense | SEP

I thought the claim to have acted in self defence was the way one justified an act of harm. — unenlightened

In that case the OP is a probing of the justification: How does the justification work? Does the justification stand? A justification needs to be more than a simple claim or assertion. In a similar way, the OP could be construed as a devil's advocate argument for pacifism.

...if the principle of self defence cannot stand alone... — unenlightened

What do you take the "principle of self-defense" to be? It's not so clear what such a thing is supposed to be.

But the facts forced him to change his mind.

...

It is all the more impressive that such an epistemic method worked despite the deeper intuitions of one of the most brilliant ever thinkers. — apokrisis

Yes, very true! I suppose my point is that someone who does not share Einstein's intuition will not feel any force from his claim. Such intuitions are often defended by a vague appeal to "the science," which is what I think is happening in Michael's case. Then when one probes the supposed inferences they find that there is nothing more than an intuition. My background theism causes me to desire to remain open to the possibility that color may have some non-arbitrary meaning, and this provides me with an additional motive to question the validity of the inferences. That is the minor point I was trying to make at the outset.

Again, a pragmatist asks only what use is this belief? Does the belief have observable consequences? If not, it is not even a theory capable of being wrong. So it is up to the theist to deduce the consequences of their theory such that they stand counterfactually opposed to some clear alternative and so measureable on that explicit basis. — apokrisis

Sure, and I haven't really considered these questions vis-a-vis pragmatism. I also haven't worked out where Peirce's pragmatism ends and James' begins. At the same time, I don't know whether intuitions such as Einstein's are pragmatic in this sense. The same would go for John Henry Newman's "illative sense," which is a kind of broad and fundamental inductive or abductive belief. Not all beliefs are equally pragmatic, or equally able to be suspended.

Even the null hypothesis would do as that alternative – the statistical case that there is some effect to be discussed rather than just some random noise in the data. So what difference does your version of a God make in this natural world? What difference would His absence make? What effect are you making claims for in a suitably counterfactual fashion? Where is then the evidence in terms of at least some statistical reason for a pause for thought? — apokrisis

I think there are many different kinds of arguments for God's existence, especially when God is taken to be transcendent and is thought to be able to manifest in very different ways. I don't really know enough about you to know what kind of argument would resonate with you, or whether I am capable of making it.

Of course the theist might take refuge in transcendence. But why would any rigorous epistemology go along with that? Once isn't a pragmatist because one dislikes truth. — apokrisis

And why would any rigorous theology go along with the idea that God is reducible to an epistemic object? This is where the incommensurable paradigms begin to collide, and I don't know that there are neat and tidy answers to be had.

For example, is an epistemology less rigorous if it admits of beings which transcend humans, and in particular the capacities of the human mind?

When one metaphysics endlessly has to retreat in the face of scientific advance, and the other metaphysics instead keeps looking scientifically sounder by the day, I would say history is indeed passing its judgement on the beliefs of humans. — apokrisis

Yes, I agree.

Am I operating in that paradigm? As a pragmatist, I would say not. — apokrisis

I don't know, but you began with a god-of-the-gaps inquiry and it seemed that you were unfamiliar with the relativizing of the would-be brute-fact structure. We see a similar dynamic when Aristotle is content to appeal to brute facts where Plato will desire a higher and more unified metaphysical explanation.

But my point there was that the naturalist is generally able to talk to the fundamentalist without in any way prescinding from a naturalistic paradigm, for the fundamentalist has a tendency to confront naturalism on its own terms. Think for example of intelligent design theorists, who hold that there are demonstrable and unfillable gaps. But I am more of a classical theist, and the classical theist won't generally address naturalism on its own terms. What this means is that the fundamentalist's evidence for God can straightforwardly square off against the naturalist's evidence of absence, because they disagree primarily on the particular evidence and not on the general inferences. But evidence of absence for the fundamentalist's God need not count as evidence of absence for the classical theist's God. This does have to do with transcendence, but the transcendence is not ad hoc and in fact predates the fundamentalist's approach by a large stretch of time.

If you can show me the effect in some controlled fashion – show it isn't just nature being random – then I would say, well let's start investigating that as a class of cause. — apokrisis

And would you say that effects that cannot be controlled can still count as evidence?

So Peirce of course had to presume something as a starting point. He "believed" nature is essentially tychic. Rooted in true spontaneity. — apokrisis

Interesting.

The Big Bang is the tale of infinite dimensional possibility being broken by its own dimensional symmetry breaking. Absolute spontaneity reducing itself to a Planckian residue of just three spatial directions organised by exactly those global and local symmetries that could not in the end be completely cancelled out of existence.

The Big Bang starts at the point where nearly all free possibility was wiped out. And that then resulted in a hot seed of dimensional structure – a fleck of energetic order – which took off towards its own form of self-cancellation or temporal inversion in expanding and cooling its way to its own Heat Death. — apokrisis

Okay - I think I followed this part best. :grin:

So as a cosmology that provides a metaphysical alternative to transcendent theism, it is pretty detailed. It relies on mathematical strength arguments about Lorentz boosts and Lie groups. It demands all the mathematical machinery of general relativity and quantum field theory. It raises a whole set of factual issues about "the missing critical mass" or "quantum weirdness". — apokrisis

So then what is the counterfactual case for Tychism? For the idea that Logos is a byproduct of chance rather than a fundamental reality?

As I read the Wikipedia article on Tychism I find that much of it seems to be in sync with theism and not opposed to it. According to that article it is primarily meant to target deterministic, necessitarian, mechanistic accounts. But I should say that many of the ideas in the culture strike me as leaning too heavily on extrapolated forms of Darwinian theory. In many ways Darwin has become our keystone to interpreting the world, and think this may be due more to a vacuum than to careful thinking or observation.

I’m not clear what you are driving at. But I have no problem if you are saying the negative can’t be proved. I can’t claim evidence against a transcendent “God did it” story. One could always adjust a supernatural claim to lie just beyond the reality that can be evidenced.

I mean scientists can posit superdeterminism as the way to regain realism in quantum mechanics. There is always a way to suggest a hidden cause beyond the reach of the evidence available. — apokrisis

We can agree that the negative can't be strictly proved, but I do not see it as a matter of theological unfalsifiability:

So sure, as pragmatists, we advance by having beliefs that we seek to doubt. Einstein had his classical presumptions and because they could be counterfactually expressed, they could be shown to be wrong. — apokrisis

Einstein had a great deal of difficulty doubting his own theory because his metaphysical parameters did not admit of the possibility that his theory could be wrong. For him it was presumably not even a proper theory or thesis. A non-static universe was for Einstein bad physics in an obvious way. Similarly, for Scientism teleology is bad science, for science is supposed to be inherently mechanistic. As with Michael's positions, these claims have to do with the paradigm being used, and not primarily with the scientific data. They only become falsifiable once a paradigm shift makes room for a new kind of data.

Similarly, if the naturalist thinks that the only possible argument for theism is a god of the gaps argument, then it seems to me that it is the paradigm that is controlling his conclusion more than the data. A piece of evidence may be absent, but it may also be deemed inadmissible. It would seem that the naturalist is by definition conceiving of the only possibly live evidences for theism as inadmissible. The argument is something like, "If God were an object within the universe then he would be experimentally verifiable, and the absence of this experimental evidence is evidence of absence." The (classical) theist responds that this is a fine argument except for the fact that God is not and has never been conceived as an object within the universe. Internalism is a non-starter for the theist. It's not a matter of adjusting supernatural claims, but rather of attending to the actual claims that have been with us for thousands of years.

More pointedly, the question of whether the metaphysical structure is or is not a brute fact is not adjudicable within a naturalistic paradigm, but it does not thereby follow that it is not adjudicable. The presuppositions of the scientific domain can be interrogated, just not by science. If there can be evidence for something, then there can be evidence for the absence of that something, even when there cannot be proof for the absence of it.* The question is then not one of whether the naysayer has proof for the absence of something, but whether they have evidence for the absence of something. Certainly Michael has no proof that color is arbitrary, but the substantial question asks whether he has evidence that color is arbitrary (and this evidence will in turn help us to understand what is meant by 'arbitrary' in this context).

* And because of this the god-of-the-gaps paradigm of the modern naturalist matches the theological paradigm of the modern fundamentalist, which ensures that these two camps seldom talk past each other. Both are working with a similar conception of God.

Not specified, sure -- I'm reading into him. — Moliere

See:

Aristotle has not identified natural slavery with being a barbarian. He has identified it with having a certain condition of soul. National or geographical origin is a derivative characteristic (4(7).7.1327b20-36). — Aristotle's Defensible Defense of Slavery, by Peter L. P. Simpson

It's his mixture of biology with politics that is really close conceptually to the race-based reasonings for slavery: he doesn't explicitly put slavish souls into a biological category, — Moliere

What would it mean to "put slavish souls into a biological category"?

Are appeals to "natural world" any less ambiguous than appeals to "scientific method"? — Moliere

I think the latter appeal is less ambiguous than the former, but both would seem to be less ambiguous than the descriptions you have been giving.

One of the things that'd have to be worked out is how it is that scientists of different metaphysical beliefs can work together? — Moliere

I think what you're missing is that, in large part, they can't. The metaphysical differences between the groups you are identifying are accidental qua science. There are some metaphysics which are compatible with science and some which are not. It is an invalid argument to identify a few which are compatible and then claim that metaphysics is tangential to science. For example, science at least presupposes things like causal regularities, the intelligibility of reality, and the human mind's ability to know it. When Aristotle rejects Parmenides and Heraclitus he paves the metaphysics of science.

I think what we can draw from this thread is that people very seldom have any clear idea of what they mean by "science." If we literally applied a Wittgenstenian language-as-use approach, "science" would probably be the name of a modern god who is invoked in important questions, and who must be trusted. The creedal statement is, "I trust the science," and there is no clear referent for what "the science" is supposed to point to.

No, because “harm” is more than just physical pain. — Bob Ross

But could Lionino not say the same thing, namely that the child who does not feel the needle penetrating their skin is still being harmed by the needle?

That is true as well; but, like I said, the needle is the means and it produces two simultaneous effects: physical harm and immunity. — Bob Ross

Simultaneous in what sense?

My point with Lionino was that the relevant difference between punching someone in self-defense and injecting someone with a needle to provide immunity is that the latter case has a means which has a double effect whereas the former has one effect that produces the other effect. Viz., me punching that perp in the face directly produces only the effect of causing harm and only indirectly (as a subsequence) the effect of preserving myself—which is not a double effect proper. It is the 7 diagram as opposed to the V. — Bob Ross

It's not so clear to me that self-defense involves an intent to harm. Aquinas says that one can apply lethal force in self-defense, so long as one is not intending to kill. Self-defense aims at self-preservation, and this could be done by fleeing or incapacitating the aggressor. But:

but I am thinking of cases of self-defense which would require [causing harm], as is the case for the vast majority (e.g., punching someone in the face, knocking them out, engaging in a shootout, etc.). — Bob Ross

So if an intruder comes into my house with a gun, and I am quietly standing behind him with a baseball bat, is it permissible for me to incapacitate him by hitting him in the head? In such a case have I used harm as a means to incapacitate him, or have I sought to incapacitate him while accepting a certain degree of harm? This is a fine-grained distinction.

When we consider self-defense in the context of double effect, and scrutinize the criterion that the bad effect may not be a means to the good effect, it becomes crucial to determine what we mean by a means. Is it a causal or temporal means? Or an intentional means? We are apparently asking about the relation of the incapacitation of the aggressor to the harming of the aggressor. Is the harming of the aggressor a means to the incapacitation of the aggressor in such a way that double effect is precluded?

When I look through Aquinas it would seem that he does not view harm as a proper act. More information is required. The act could be punishment, repelling/self-defense, maiming, torturing, etc. Each deserves its own analysis. Because Aquinas does not view harm as a proper act, it does not function for him as an intentional means. For Aquinas a means when considered in a moral sense would presumably need to be a proper act, with its own specifiable, volitional nature. I think this is right.

But perhaps the difficulty remains insofar as we are judging a relation of effects, not acts. Harm is an effect of our act whether or not it is an act in itself, and there are obviously acts which are impermissible on account of the harm they bring about.

Yes, this is true: I could say it is not bad in-itself to harm another but, rather, it is bad in-itself to harm an innocent person; and this is honestly probably the solution. The problem is that if we are analyzing harm in-itself, then it does seem bad irregardless—which comes to light when we consider using excessive force in self-defense. — Bob Ross

...More precisely, this comes back to our difference over natural evil vs. moral evil. We are morally prohibited from injuring others in the sense of doing injustice to them, not in the sense of causing any kind of harm whatsoever. Along these lines, I would want to say that there is no absolute prohibition on causing harm, but only a kind of relative prohibition. Put differently, harm in the sense we are considering it is a consequence, and a non-consequentialist moral approach will not be directly concerned with harm in the same way that a consequentialist approach would be. Aversion to an act on the basis of a harm consequence is, at least for the non-consequentialist, a kind of indirect aversion, which is a legitimate consideration but not a central duty.

For me the heart of this thread is the question of the moral status of harm simpliciter. Supposing we have a duty to not harm or minimize harm, in what does this precisely consist?

2b. There are no teleological realities.

...

I think we both reject the scientistic interpretation of 2b, . . . — Leontiskos

Hold up. Biosemioticians like Stan Salthe explicitly recognise a hierarchy of grades of telos that runs from human purpose to biological function to physical tendency. Sorry, no divine intervention involved. Just the appropriate divisions of semiosis as a system science approach embracing all four ArIstotelean causes. — apokrisis

Then it sounds to me that he rejects 2b, no? Were you reading "theological" instead of "teleological"?

Not really. The brute fact is structural rather than material. So developmental rather than existential.

And science has gone the same way even at Its fundamental physical level of quantum field theory. Hence Ontic Structural Realism as the recent shiny new toy in metaphysics. — apokrisis

Oh, I agree that the structure is what is at stake. Later in my post I said, "Reframing the supposedly brute-fact structure as intentional or teleological is not a scientific move."

The argument goes different. GR showed the cosmos is unstable. It would either have to be contracting or expanding. If contracting, it ought to have already disappeared from existence. It indeed exists, so therefore it must be expanding. — apokrisis

But it seems that, at first, not only did Einstein fail to recognize this, but he actively opposed it. For example:

Einstein had nothing to say to the young Abbé about the mathematical part of his paper, technically it was perfect, but he completely disagreed with him concerning its physical interpretation. Einstein said very crudely: “from the point of view of Physics this seems to me abominable”. What’s the reason of such brutal reaction? In fact Einstein did not admit at this time an expanding universe. Probably influenced by his implicit Spinozist philosophy, he did not accept the fact that the universe had a real history. One remembers that Einstein had shown his strong opposition to the papers of Alexander Friedmann, this Russian mathematician and meteorologist who discovered in 1922-1924 solutions of Einstein’s equations corresponding to expanding and contracting universes. According to Einstein, the universe as a whole has to remain forever immutable. Einstein’s first cosmological model, published in 1917, was indeed a spherical and perfectly static universe. It is worth noting that Georges Lemaître, at the time he wrote his paper on the recession of the nebulae, did not know Friedmann’s discoveries. In 1929 Lemaître told that it was Einstein himself who informed him about the existence of the “Friedmann (expanding and contracting) universes”. — Einstein and Lemaître: two friends, two cosmologies…

To my understanding, later on Edwin Hubble empirically confirmed Lemaître's thesis by showing that the universe is in fact expanding, at which point Einstein capitulated. Einstein's resistance is a good example of the way that metaphysical theories interact with the scientific data.

Moving a bit further:

...and then what remains is a difference over a more narrow version of 2b, "There are no divine teleological realities."

...

The more interesting question surely has to do with the narrower version of 2b, but I will leave it there for now. — Leontiskos

We could call the narrower version 2c:

2c. There are no divine teleological realities.

Or, "There are no teleological realities or causes external to the universe itself." I think this is what your point with Salthe was directed against. It seems to me that the arguments here will be parallel to the arguments surrounding 2b, namely that there is a key difference between saying that one has no evidence for something and saying that something does not exist. This is sort of a topic of its own.

Given the following stipulations, I am wondering if there is a way to salvage the principle of self-defense; and would like to here all of your responses. — Bob Ross

This is an interesting and culturally relevant topic. It is also a well-written OP. In general I think @Lionino has the right approach.

No. A means is something that facilitates the end: causing pain to the child is not a part of what facilitates the end of giving them immunity; which is self-apparent when one considers if the end would still be facilitated properly on a child with an inability to feel pain. — Bob Ross

Does it then follow that it is okay to "harm" an attacker who cannot feel pain? And that because the end is still achieved in such a case, therefore the infliction of "harm" is a side effect?

See:

Is harm thought to be synonymous with injustice? Or can harm occur which is not unjust? For example, if someone enters your house with a gun and you sneak up behind them and knock them unconscious in order to incapacitate them, would the negative utilitarian say that you have harmed them? If this does not count as harm, then it is presumably because the act is not unjust, and in that case injustice (in the classical sense) would be coextensive with harm (in the negative utilitarian sense). — Leontiskos

The key here is that when it comes to self-defense harm is not a precondition for success. Because of this, incapacitation is always to be morally preferred to incapacitation via harm. It also raises the question of whether the aggressor is ever harmed by strict self-defense, even when they are physically injured. Or in other words, one must consider a distinction between moral harm and physical harm.

I admit, though, that this is only an indirect and incomplete answer to the OP. For example, one relevant difference between your case and the nurse who vaccinates or the surgeon who makes an incision, is that this is presumably done with consent or at least implied consent on the part of the patient. Classically speaking, the categorical (3) should [be] qualified by the innocence of the victim: "Do not harm the innocent." For whatever reason, in our age this qualification is seldom included. And then it becomes a question of which premise to prefer.

If you build a world where capitalism has no social brakes, then you get the world that deserves. Impatient drivers and frustrated transport planners are a tiny part of that larger story.

And the criticism concerning wokeism is that it is a turning of individuals against individuals by harnessing the amplification of social media. The polarisation of society into competing online mobs obsessing over finer and finer social distinctions. A diversion of political energy away from the larger story of how we all have to cooperate to share the one planet. — apokrisis

Good points. :up:

My bold claim is just how quickly this project has been progressing these past 50 years. — apokrisis

Yes, and I have no reason to disagree with you even though I don't currently have a grasp on the full implications of semiotics, especially as regards its application to non-human realities such as non-human biological organisms.

OK, theism would be our sticking point then. I doubt I could have had a more atheistic upbringing. :smile:

But pursuing that line would be futile unless you were defending some point where a deity must intrude into the workings of nature. If God is unnecessary for consciousness, fine feelings, or the Platonic necessity of mathematical patterns, then where is His role in causality? — apokrisis

Okay, interesting. I don't often argue theism on these forums, although I am not necessarily opposed to doing so. The argument at hand is more subtle:

1. If theism is true, then God's will is an existent teleological reality.
2a. Theism is true.
2b. There are no teleological realities.

2a represents the modus ponens and 2b represents the modus tollens, and in this case we are adjudicating between 2a and 2b. I think we both reject the scientistic interpretation of 2b, and then what remains is a difference over a more narrow version of 2b, "There are no divine teleological realities."

So all causality appears to be wrapped up in this physics. It is pure internalism. No divine hand needed either to light the blue touch paper, nor call time in a final judgement. — apokrisis

...and then in this version of the argument the internalism ends up being externalized, to one extent or another. So in this rendition the naturalist will posit a brute fact where the theist posits a intentional ordering, and these sorts of disputes move further and further towards metaphysics and away from science. So if Michael were to say that color is arbitrary, I would want to know what it is arbitrary over and against. I would want to know what is precisely meant by 'arbitrary'.

But Natural Philosophy encourages the idea that the Cosmos is a Darwinian event, and even a structualist story – in particular, a dissipative structure story. And I like the idea that pansemiosis is another way of labelling the physics of dissipative structure. — apokrisis

So is pansemiosis something like the idea that semiosis occurs even where there is no organic life? Curiously, the first hit on Google initially frames the idea theologically.

But anyway, that would be my next challenge. Where does any divine cause seem needed in a Cosmos that keeps seeming to be explained in the terms of a self-organising structure of relations?

If it can be shown that the Cosmos is not just some random thermal event, but instead the self-organising story of a world managing to exist because it constructs the very heat sink upon which its existence is contingent, well where is even a God of the gaps a necessary character in the collective narrative? — apokrisis

I have never put much stock in scientific arguments for God's existence, but that is in part because I have not kept abreast of the science and would not constitute a very good judge. Reframing the supposedly brute-fact structure as intentional or teleological is not a scientific move. But I recently learned that the Big Bang was initially seen as evidence for creation by both sides, and that scientific internalists like Einstein resisted the theory because of this. I found that surprising and interesting. It is interesting that it is intuitive and commonly accepted that <If the Big Bang occurred, then the universe was probably created>, but I have never been sure what exact form of inference is supposed to be occurring in such a move. Often in such cases—pro and con—it feels as if we are moving beyond our paygrade.

My point here was not that we have clearly demonstrable arguments for the modus ponens with 2a, but rather that we have no clearly demonstrable arguments for the modus tollens with 2b. The more interesting question surely has to do with the narrower version of 2b, but I will leave it there for now.

(I've fallen behind and I don't know if these posts are still relevant)

The fact that we know that phenomenal states can exist without external stimuli and that phenomenal states can be manipulated to provide varying perceptions of the same external stimuli forecloses direct realism as a viable option. Yet it persists. — Hanover

This is a bit like saying that we can dream about apples therefore we don't know whether apples exist, because we never know whether we are dreaming. It is a kind of overdoing of skepticism which is not in fact rational.

If I have a fear of dogs and I feel that fear every time I see a dog, is the fearsome dog an object like a red pen, with the fearsomeness and the redness within the object, or is the fearsomeness within me the perceiver only?

If I internally create the fearsomeness but not the redness, how do you decide which traits of the perception go into the internally created bucket and which go into the objectively existing bucket? — Hanover

Do you think fearsomeness is purely internal? I would suggest looking into the emotion and reality of fear, and what elicits it.

Agreed. But the semiotic position would be that "red" is reducible to some kind of sign relation we have with the world. — apokrisis

True, and I don't deny that.

This ought to help clarify the stakes. The brain evolved to make sense or its world in terms that increased a species fitness. So there is no reason to think red exists as part of some wavelength frequency detection device. — apokrisis

Right. One can think of color along the lines of a number of different measures, but I see nothing special about the wavelength frequency approach. It is a quantitative measure relating to the visual operation, but need not be the center of gravity for sight or color.

But given that the brain's colour centre is sited right in the shape and contour decoding path of the object recognition region area, there is reason to believe that hue discrimination is all about the ecologically-relevant function of making shaped objects pop out of their confused surroundings. — apokrisis

This is how I tend to think of color, and it is how many of the ancient philosophers thought of color (i.e. color is the basis of shape).

Red is a useful sign that here is an object that now sticks out like a sore thumb as it is covered by a surface with a rather narrow reflectance bandwidth. Everything around it is kind of green, because well that is a sign that plants have their own evolutionarily optimal setting for the photopigments used in photosynthesis. And then red is the natural contrast that plants would used to signal the ripe fruit they want dispersing. — apokrisis

Interesting. I had been thinking about the green photopigment, but not the red of fruit.

So all qualia ought to be reducible in this ecologically semiotic fashion. The logic should be clear from the environments we evolve in. Organisms are engaged in sign relations with each other, with other organisms, and with a world in terms of all its pressing threats and urgings.

This is why physics doesn't answer the crucial question. And nor does treating the signs as world-independently real – actual idealistic qualia. — apokrisis

These are good points and arguments.

I want to say that the person devoted to some variety of Scientism labors under a strong fact-value distinction and claims that any sort of normative or value-laden predication must be false, and that the phenomena in question are then ultimately arbitrary. They appeal to "the science" to support this, in a circular fashion. I don't think these arguments are valid, but once a teleological reality is introduced as part of the genetic cause of the phenomena in question, the conclusion of the invalid argument is actually shown to be false. For example, a fixation on the quantitative notion of wavelength frequency can lead one to the conclusion that colors are arbitrary, but then the teleology of an ecological-evolutionary basis for both the faculty and objects of sight comes in to explain why colors are not arbitrary. (Regarding the faculty of sight, one could also consult the use of different colors in advertising.)

I think this is all well and good. Bona fide anti-teleological arguments are invalid, or at least inductive and to that extent incomplete. Ecological and evolutionary arguments can show why things like color are not arbitrary. But then as a theist I hold to a more fundamental teleological reality, which also points towards a diverse and multifaceted world. Ergo: I am not committed to the idea that the ecological-evolutionary explanation is the complete explanation. Perhaps alternative analyses will simultaneously hold true in the future.

Put differently, there is the thesis that it is arbitrary that blood and fruit are red, that leaves are green, and that the sun produces the color of light that it does. According to this thesis, it could equally be just the opposite. I don't see this as a scientific thesis, and I'm not even convinced it is a falsifiable thesis. At best we have no evidence for or against such an unqualified thesis, nor for any contrary thesis that operates at such a high metaphysical level. One could reasonably say that we have no evidence against such a thesis, so long as they also admit that we have no evidence for such a thesis. It is a non-scientific question. This is why I distrust the newspaper headline, "Science proves color is arbitrary!" (Not that you are saying this - the ecological/evolutionary argument goes far to show that color has a strong contextual significance. But the simple invalidity is also worth noting, even before falsification.)

The problem is when someone argues for something like naive colour realism/realist colour primitivism, or that there is a "correct" way for an object that reflects 620-750nm light to look. These views do not accept that the percept is a percept, instead thinking it a mind-independent property of the pen (or at least to resemble such a property). And these views are contradicted by physics and the neuroscience of perception. — Michael

Suppose you stopped appealing to scientific studies that do not seem to support the points you think they do. Would there be any arguments for your position? Where are the real arguments to be found?

Suppose that apokrisis is right that the ability to see fruit is bound up with the ability to distinguish the red range. In that case there is something normative or "correct" about the fruit-eater's ability to distinguish the red range. Or that green relates to the photopigments used in photosynthesis, and is therefore related to sunlight, the sunlight which is also normative for our color perception?

The point here is that the inference to the conclusion that there is nothing appropriate about the human ability to distinguish color is a metaphysical claim that goes beyond the science. I'm guessing there is no sound scientific argument with the conclusion, "...Therefore, color perception is purely arbitrary and subjectivistic." You are claiming to know things that you do not know. The colors in nature are not necessarily arbitrary, and our perception of them therefore need not be arbitrary either.

The red is what you perceive in your mind. It is that phenomenal state. — Hanover

Says who? Not the dictionary or common use. Certainly red is perceived by the mind, and certainly we have phenomenal experiences that include red-perceptions, but it does not follow from any of this that red is nothing more than a color percept, a purely subjective experience.

That there is an object X that causes you to see red and an object Y that causes you to see white doesn't mean that X is red and Y is white. — Hanover

I think it does. Is there any real argument to the contrary?

The base question here asks what 'red' means in the phrase, "This pen is red." The phrase means something like, "This pen possesses the color-property we call 'red'." 'Red' is a color-property of visual objects. I don't know how much more can be said about it.

Now you want to say that after we learn that the redness of the pen results from the manner in which the pen reflects light, we have somehow invalidated this claim. What is your actual argument for why the claim is invalidated? Is there a real argument here?

It's for that reason we don't say my fingers moving are the word "red." — Hanover

'Red' is a sign, and the typing of your fingers are the efficient cause of that sign. The difference between the creation of a sign and the sign is very different from the difference between a red object and the stimulation of the eye which beholds it.

If you want to say that X and Y are different to the extent one makes you see red and one white, that's fine, but that doesn't mean X is red, where "is" means "to be." — Hanover

What do you say it would mean for X to be red? If you have no answer to this question then your claims here are not meaningful.

X is a bunch of electronic impulses in the computer code example and it doesn't look red. It looks like code, or maybe just computer parts. — Hanover

In the code example you are confusing the code with the LCD output that it produces. The code isn't white, but the LCD output is.

There is something Matrix-esque occurring here. "Hey dude, the apple you are eating isn't real, it's just code. It's the code that's real!" We could argue about whether this claim holds good in The Matrix, but there is the simpler route of noting that we do not live in The Matrix. Pens are not computer code. Is the claim about wavelengths more real than the color-claim? Only if we hold to some cousin of Scientism. But the more pertinent question asks why we are supposed to think that the two claims are even opposed.

What is making that image white? Is it that "it reflects xxxx under normal circumstances"? If so, normativity is doing a lot of work there, and it also does not describe what we're trying to describe in any way. I find this a real problem. — AmadeusD

I'd say that the statement, "This pen is red," is opaque, in some sense simple or sui generis. It's not a scientific statement; it's not an anti-scientific statement; it's not a statement about light reflection, etc. The mistaken assumption that the statement is somehow reducible is leading to strange inferences in light of scientific findings.

For example, "By that statement you were saying that 'red' in no way involves the reflection of light, and so now we know you were wrong." The simple answer is, "No, the statement is not saying that 'red' in no way involves the reflection of light." The revisionists want to say that it is wrong to call the pen red, but they have no clear sense of why or how it is supposed to be wrong. ...And the quasi-idealist attempt to say that everything relating to redness is in the mind, and nothing relating to redness is in the pen, is a desperation attempt which surely cannot stand.

In this analogy, the code is the noumena and the color is the phenomenal. — Hanover

But I am not a Kantian. I do not believe we can know about things that we cannot know (noumena).

The point being that there is no reason to claim any property on the noumenal. The pen and the perception of the pen need bear no relationship to one another. — Hanover

But even here your example fails, because just as there are distinguishing properties of red and white pens, so too are there distinguishing properties of red and white images, and also distinguishing properties of the two sets of code that generates those different images.

If the same set of code produced the two different images then your example would aid you; but it doesn't. There is absolutely no evidence for saying that there is nothing external about red, and all evidence to the contrary. Two pens which are alike in every way except color have different external properties that account for their different colors. Even Michael would presumably agree that the two pens possess different properties, and that it is precisely the differing external properties that result in our differing color percepts.

Consider 2 sets of computer code, one that projects an image of a white pen on the screen and a second that projects a red pen on the screen. Which code is white? — Hanover

Hmm? We could, by analogy, call the code white which causes the white image, but it is the image on the screen that is white, not the code.

Do you think that pens do not really exist, and the mind is just projecting them? That there is no difference between a dream or a hallucination and reality?

See:

The idea here seems to be that we first state that the pen is red, and then we learn something about the way the eye or the mind processes color, and we then conclude that our statement must have been false. This is a very odd idea. It involves the strange notion that our statement must have been opposed to what we went on to learn. — Leontiskos

‘We have eyes, therefore we cannot see’ would be almost too much for a Pyrrhonist to swallow. — Post on Indirect Realism

...The idea here seems to be that we first state that the pen is red, and then we learn something about the way the eye or the mind processes color, and we then conclude that our statement must have been false. This is a very odd idea. It involves the strange notion that our statement must have been opposed to what we went on to learn.

There is no external red. At best, there is an external object that elicits a phenomenal state of red. Just like pain. There is no external pain. At best, there is an external object that elicits pain. — Hanover

Color (Merriam-Webster)
1a. a phenomenon of light (such as red, brown, pink, or gray) or visual perception that enables one to differentiate otherwise identical objects

Consider two pens, a red pen and a white pen. Is it your claim that there is no external difference between these two pens? Or: that the only difference between the two pens is something the mind projects into the pens? (Note that your word "elicits" already tells us that there is an external basis for differing color perceptions.)

That's not the sense of redness that is our ordinary, everyday conception of colour. — Michael

I don't think you managed to read my post.

Our ordinary, everyday conception of colour is that of the mental percepts that light stimulating the eyes causes to occur — Michael

When someone says, "This pen is red," they are not saying, "This pen accompanies a mental percept of 'red'." "Red" does does not denote a mental percept. Try a dictionary, for once.

All I am doing here is explaining what the science shows... — Michael

All you are doing is being confused by the science. Your inference is that because the sight of red requires a form of mental processing, therefore 'red' signifies a percept and not a property. This is just more bad philosophy; an invalid argument.

The colors we see are based on physical properties of objects and lights that cause us to see them as colored, to be sure, but these physical properties are different in important ways from the colors we perceive.

Again, it does not follow that colors denote percepts.

So you want to say something like "the pen is red, but not actually red". This is enough to convince me that your account is mistaken. And shows well the sorts of word games you will play in your metaphysics. — Banno

I just read Myles Burnyeat's, "The sceptic in his place and time," (quoted here). His topic is "insulation": that whereby one insulates philosophical claims from everyday claims and everyday claims from philosophical claims. I think Michael is the premiere representative of insulation on TPF.

In the final section of his article Burnyeat looks at the history, and concludes that insulation did not emerge with Pyrrhonism, Descartes, Hume, or Berkeley.* These all contributed in paving the way towards insulation, but they did not hold it. It was only with Kant that true insulation finally came onto the scene.

Which brings us, as many will have foreseen, to Kant. It was Kant who persuaded philosophy that one can be, simultaneously and without contradiction, an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist. That is, it was Kant who gave us the idea that there is a way of saying the same sort of thing as real live sceptics like Aenesidemus used to say, namely, ‘The knowing subject contributes to what is known,’ which nevertheless does not impugn the objectivity of the judgements in which the knowledge is expressed. Where Aenesidemus would cite the empirical factors (jaundice and the like) which obstruct objective knowledge, the Kantian principle that objects have to conform to our understanding is designed to show that our judgements are validated, not impugned, by the contribution of the knowing mind. But Kant can make this claim, famously difficult as it is, only because in his philosophy the pre-supposition link is well and truly broken. ‘The stove is warm,’ taken empirically, implies no philosophical view at the transcendental level where from now on the philosophical battle will be fought. Empirical realism is invulnerable to scepticism and compatible with transcendental idealism.47

In this way, with the aid of his distinction of levels (insulation de iure), Kant thought to refute scepticism once and for all. The effect, however, was that scepticism itself moved upstairs to the transcendental level. — Burnyeat, The sceptic in his place and time, pp. 343-4

* I think Burnyeat overlooks the "two truth theory" of the Medieval period, which was almost certainly a precursor of insulation.

In the U.S. criteria of efficiency and industriousness cater to "motonormativity," as well as a laissez-faire attitude where the smaller yields to the bigger just as the gazelle yields to the lion. Roads are for cars and sidewalks are for people, and the two are often seen as mutually exclusive. The road and especially the highway are associated with industry and productive labor, whereas the pedestrian and cyclist are associated with recreation, and productivity is believed to take precedence over recreation. This is true in all but the largest cities, such as New York.

I don't think the U.S. necessarily has this right, but as someone living here it is hard to see what possible motives and changes could overcome our status quo. It seems like nothing less than a miracle would be required.

I also suspect that population density is indirectly correlated to motonormativity wherever cars are readily available.

Except when we say that the pen is red we are not (ordinarily) saying that the pen has a surface layer of atoms that reflects light with a wavelength of ~700nm. — Michael

Nor are we saying that it doesn't, which is what you seem to falsely believe. We mean that the pen has a property of redness, and the specialist is simply explaining what that property is constituted by (i.e. it is constituted by light reflection of a certain wavelength).

e.g. when we explain variations in colour perception, such that some see a white and gold dress and some see a black and blue dress — Michael

Explaining variations in color perception and predicating redness of a pen are two very different things, and the former is much less common. Confusing the two leads to problems.

the colours they see are mental percepts — Michael

No they're not. Were you to give an argument for such a position it would be invalid. If I am 100 feet away from the Statue of Liberty and you are a mile away from the Statue of Liberty, the size of the Statue will appear different to each of us, but it does not follow that we are merely seeing a percept.

If we were only seeing our own percepts then we would not be able to read posts on TPF:

1. If the black and white colors on TPF did not exist, then I would not be able to read posts.
2. But I can read posts.
3. Therefore, the black and white colors on TPF do exist. — Leontiskos

---

There is one side insisting that red is the experience that we have of red and the other side that red is the thing that causes the experience, for several pages now. — Lionino

What I find remarkable is the claim which says that it is science which proves that red is a "color percept" and nothing else. It is that magical appeal to "The Science" which keeps cropping up all over public discourse.

I have not given a great deal of thought to the philosophy of color. Like much of contemporary philosophy, it doesn't seem like it would be a great use of my time. My basic view is something like the idea that color exists in the world in the way that radio stations exist, and the human eye is like a receiver for those radio stations.*

Now there are probably people who understand that eyes are needed to see colors, and yet do not appreciate the complexity of the receiver. Lording this over them would amount to little more than, "The receiver is more complicated than you realize!" Doing this seems like making a mountain out of a molehill. Doing so via the claim that color is entirely in the mind and not at all in reality seems to be such an exaggeration as to be simply false.

* Although this is not to say that a differently constituted receiver could not interpret the signal differently.

The "common sense" view, before any scientific study, is naive realism: — Michael

So you say.

The fact that people talk about redness as if it is mind-independent does not entail that they are talking about redness as if (3) is true. People tend to talk about redness as if both (1) and (2) are true. — Michael

Let's go back to your claim:

There is no red "in" the pen. The pen just has a surface layer of atoms that reflects light with a wavelength of ~700nm. When light stimulates the eyes it causes the neurological activity responsible for colour percepts, and we name the colour percept ordinarily caused by 700nm light "red". — Michael

If the pen has a surface layer of atoms that reflect light at with a wavelength of ~700nm then there is both red in the pen and the pen is red. If by saying that the pen is red we were saying that the pen is or has a color percept, then we would be committing a category error, but we do not do that when we say the pen is red.

The common person does not know how the surface of the pen is seen by the eye. So what? Doesn't everyone agree that the pen has a property that corresponds to our communal predicate 'red'? It seems quite wrong to me to simply insist that 'red' means a color percept and not a property of the pen. It would seem to make little difference whether the property of the pen is fully understood. I agree with Banno that this is Kantianism run amok.

The fact that people talk about redness as if it is mind-independent does not entail that they are talking about redness as if (3) is true. — Michael

But you are splitting hairs, for it also does not entail that they are talking as if (3) is false. If you ask them how the eye perceives the red in the pen, they will simply tell you that they don't know.

-

Here is an argument for you.

1. If the black and white colors on TPF did not exist, then I would not be able to read posts.
2. But I can read posts.
3. Therefore, the black and white colors on TPF do exist.

My eyes and my mind allow me to see colors, and because of this to read text. If there were no color on the website then there would be no color in my mind, and I would not be able to read posts.

There is no red "in" the pen. The pen just has a surface layer of atoms that reflects light with a wavelength of ~700nm. When light stimulates the eyes it causes the neurological activity responsible for colour percepts, and we name the colour percept ordinarily caused by 700nm light "red". — Michael

You are presupposing that "red" denotes the "color percept" and not the "surface layer of atoms..." Why do you make such a presupposition? When people talk about the redness of some object they certainly don't seem to be talking about their own perceptions qua perceptions.

Physics and the neuroscience of perception have proven this naive realism false. — Michael

Physics and neuroscience seem to have confused you something fierce. They certainly haven't proved that colors denote only "qualia."

Perhaps my statement was too wrong. Theorems (statements) about a concept must follow the concept's definition, lest we are talking about something else. Within the definition that consciousness is something that starts at birth and ends at death, if a body would happen to die and be somehow reanimated, that would imply they have a different soul now. Maybe that is a problem. — Lionino

I think we are running up against a terminus problem. For example, you said, "they are born with one and die with that same consciousness[/soul]." The question is something like, "Do they die with a soul that has perdured, or is death precisely the cessation of the soul?" This is the problem of substantial change, where the cessation of a substance ends up being a kind of cessation tout court. Usually we would say that death is the cessation of the soul, but empirically and not merely definitionally.

Well, their view is problematic. — Lionino

I will just agree with you and abandon that line.

So it seems there is some disagreement on "brain death" happening. Not sure what to make of it yet. — Lionino

Right, but the more pertinent fact is simply that the empirical criteria for death is revisable. So many of these questions about souls can be rephrased as questions about what occurs at death, or of what death is.

That is fine. I didn't think we had to accomodate for after-life. For that purpose we could refine the definition to: Consciousness then (or the soul etc) would start at birth or whenever we wanna say we first become conscious (mirror test?) and presumably ends in death. — Lionino

Yes, fair enough.

I was proposing an accidental change in the soul, not an essential one. Not recognising family memberes is also an accidental change. An essential change would amount to swapping the soul for another one. I think that is implied from the definition of essence. — Lionino

So going back to the problem of substantial change, the classical problem here is that a substantial change is not properly a change, because there is no substrate that underlies it. "Swapping souls" is not a change of either soul; on Descartes' view it would simply be like swapping engines in a car without changing either engine.

As I will say below, the fence is good. Your proposal that it is the standard view amounts to me to simply accepting things because it feels better that way — dogmatism. I am exploring the reasons why we must think otherwise. — Lionino

If we are searching for reasons why we must think otherwise then we are trying to jump over the moon, not the fence. If your thread is about, "Reasons for believing (aka arguments), not proof," then you can't be looking for necessary reasons ("reasons why we must think otherwise"). There is a vacillation between the fence and the moon.

The standard view is not dogmatism, it is fence-jumping. It is, "It seems to be this way, and no one has offered an argument to overthrow this seeming."

You will say that 2 is false — Lionino

No, I said that it is otiose, or pragmatically inconsequential, or unable to be practically differentiated from (1). The thing I said is false is (3).

I want to find out, do we really know these things? — Lionino

Again, this reminds me of Descartes:

This whole thing is reminiscent of the Cartesian move that, "We of course have good reason to believe that X, but do we also have the fullness of certitude?" — Leontiskos

Your trilemma ought to be rephrased instead to "We are being destroyed and recreated, but we can't know it". — Lionino

That is exactly what my (2) was. Your (2) is different.

But if we can't know whether we are being destroyed and recreated, we can't know otherwise too, so we can't know if we last and the conclusion of the discussion is agnosticism. — Lionino

I would say that either way we last, at least if 'last' is a meaningful term.

Otherwise, there are two possibilities:

1. We persist through time and we can come to reasonably believe that.
2. We don't persist through time and we can come to reasonably believe that we don't.

And that is the discussion. The knowledge claim depends on the metaphysical claim, not the other way around. — Lionino

How are such contraries the only possibilities? Why assume that we will always be able to know the metaphysical fact of the matter, or have reasonable opinion about it?

If there is a loud noise, we wake up. We dream during sleep. So there is some conscious activity there, even if at a lower level. — Lionino

Hmm. But we don't always wake up with a loud noise. The argument is fair as far as it goes, but if we are to say that we are conscious of the world when we are in a deep, dreamless sleep, then we have stretched the term "conscious" quite far. Who knows what I am now conscious of, on that definition?

Because "dramatic" is arbitrary, and most changes are permanent, often changing out opinion on a movie is permanent, yet we are not dying. How dramatic does it have to be for us to die? Arbitrary. — Lionino

The logical conclusion here seems to be that death is arbitrary.

But perhaps the point is only that the soul can change essentially without dying, like a caterpillar into a butterfly.

I don't think extreme Pyrrhonism can be defeated, only overcome. Which is why the title of the thread is Reasons for believing (aka arguments), not proof. A poor reason to believe that the soul perdures is better than no reason at all. — Lionino

"It seems that way and there are no good arguments to the contrary," is a poor reason, better than no reason at all.

I think at the heart of this is the question of what burden or standard of proof is being sought.

Fine, your opinion against mine. — Lionino

In your opinion arrows do not connote directionality? Do you think there is a reason logicians introduced the inference A→B over and above the conjunction ¬(A∧¬B)?

"2% of the population might interpret 龍 as 'dragon', but that doesn't make for a very good translation". You see how that doesn't work? — Lionino

Are you not equivocating between language speakers and non-language speakers? If only 2% of native speakers interpret 龍 as what we mean by 'dragon' in English then yes, it is a bad translation.

"No A without B in the domain of A-B pairs."
— Leontiskos

That is already implied by the phrase. — Lionino

You think the English phrase, "No A without B," implies that we must be thinking about the entire domain of speech in terms of A-B pairs? This seems clearly incorrect. In English when we say, "No pizza without heartburn" we in fact order a salad ("C"), and this satisfies the condition just like Gregory's answer does.

It is saying there is no A, if there is no B. From A→B, ¬B, we infer ¬A — (A→B),¬B|=¬A. From A→B, C, we infer nothing about A because the value of B hasn't been declared. From A→B, C, ¬B, we infer ¬A, because C doesn't interfere — (A→B),¬B, C|=¬A. — Lionino

You are again conflating the logic with the English. To think that the English entails whatever the logic entails is to beg the question and assume that the English perfectly maps the logic. That is what we are considering, not what we are assuming.

Regarding the modus tollens, the English does support it but, again, this is not the same as whether ¬A entails the truth of the conditional. These are not the same thing:

• (A→B),¬B |= ¬A
• ¬A |= (A→B)

Specifically:

• (A→B),¬B |= ¬A
• ¬A |= (A→B)
• «No A without B»,¬B |= ¬A
• ¬A |= «No A without B»

Does (4) hold? It is questionable, but if it doesn't then the translation limps, and if it does then this also holds: < C |= «No A without B» >, in which case the translation also limps since C does not semantically entail (A→B). Either way the translation limps.

I think you took my "everything else is allowed" to mean literally everything else (C), but I meant "every other values of A and B". — Lionino

But that's not what the English means. It is an arbitrary restriction of the English meaning. After all, if it's not being interpreted in favor of its literal meaning, then what is it being interpreted in favor of?

Part of the puzzle here is that in reality negations always obtain within a scope. For example, if C=salad, then C=¬A (not pizza). When we are within the same scope, C must always be either A or ¬A, and since C=¬A, C |= (A→B).

(Propositional logic seems to assume, prima facie, not only the commonsensical idea that C is neither A nor B, but also the deeply counterintuitive idea that C is neither ¬A nor ¬B. Usually if C is neither A nor B then it must be both ¬A and ¬B.)

Yes, because it doesn't lead to absurds in English. — Lionino

What absurdities does it lead to?

However, what about ¬(A→B)? What can we say about this in English? — Lionino

The solution you have arrived at is the idea that ¬(A→B) means, "A without B," and therefore (A→B) means "Not(A without B)." This misplaces the negations, acting as if the second negates the first when the opposite is true. What you are really saying is that ¬¬(A→B) means "Not(A without B)," and that (A→B) and ¬¬(A→B) are linguistically interchangeable.

What is really happening?

• A∧¬B means "A without B"
• ¬(A∧¬B) means "Not A-without-B"

Then:

• (A∧¬B) ↔ ¬(A→B)
• ¬(A∧¬B) ↔ (A→B)

And then you assume that the '↔' is applicable not only for logic, but also for English, thus:

• ¬(A→B) means "A without B"
• (A→B) means "Not A-without-B"

This is almost identical to the problems in "Do (A implies B) and (A implies notB) contradict each other?" In both cases formal logical equivalence is being conflated with semantic equivalence.

The problem was isolated in <this post>. A→B and ¬(A∧¬B) (or ¬A∨B) are not the same sentence. A→B directly supports relations like causality, whereas the other two do not. Further, the only way to prove A→B from ¬(A∧¬B) is via an indirect proof such as RAA, which is an equivalence and not a derivation. "If P then Q," and, "Not A-and-not-B" are two different claims, both in logic and in English.

-

We can see this with an example.

A: I stop eating
B: I lose weight

The implication form is A→B ("If I stop eating, then I will lose weight"). This describes a relation between eating and weight. It means that to stop eating leads to losing weight, and that if one is not losing weight then they have not stopped eating (modus tollens).

The conjunction form is ¬(A∧¬B) ("It is not the case that, it is true that I stop eating and it is false that I lose weight"). This says that A and ¬B cannot coexist. There is no relation posited between A and B.

The relation can be inferred from the conjunction, but it is not the same as the conjunction:

1. ¬(A∧¬B)
2. __Suppose A
3. __∴ B
4. ∴ A→B

(4) follows from (1) and (2), but it is not equivalent to (1), despite the fact that the truth tables are the same. Put differently:

1. ¬(A∧¬B)
2. A
3. ∴ B
4. [Meta-step: ¬(A∧¬B), A ⊢ B. Therefore, A→B given ¬(A∧¬B)]

(One could also show this with RAA)

I have an example of the nature of my complaint. A college level course in statistics that confined itself to instruction in the operation of a certain software package, the instructor, actually a professor, refusing to answer any questions on statistics itself. Needless to say, nothing there learned.

It's useful to reflect on what Aristotelian logic is for and what it is about - a way of testing for nonsense. Presupposed is the student's ability to recognize basic truths and simple nonsense. It seems to me your "device" eliminates the need for such presuppositions, and for such basic knowledge and recognition. Which has been happening for at least fifty years in US education, resulting in a population that cannot tell sense from nonsense and buys the nonsense. — tim wood

I sympathize with these points. Logical systems should be a tool of reasoning and not something we outsource our thinking to. This is a task that any system or representation must face.

The OP's project looks interesting. I will have a look when I have some more time.