Just finished exams on Thursday so looking forward to getting involved in this conversation now that I have more time.

I read Foot's paper a month ago, it's a very easy read. I have a horrible memory so this summary may leave out some of the ideas.
Foot takes aim at the hypothetical/categorical imperative dichotomy. She argues that just because something is not a hypothetical imperative (HI) does not imply is a categorical imperative (CI). The example she uses is that of a club rule or etiquette. These aren't HI because we don't have a goal we are trying to achieve when we keep them, they also aren't CI as it's not irrational to break the rules.
After this she argues that since it's not always irrational to break moral rules either, they too are not CI.

Anyway I voted for Brassier, sounds interesting.

Interesting turn of events, every time I like someones post by adding a (Y) it adds to my own number instead of theirs.

Since 48% of us effectively threw away our votes, I reckon we should have a re-vote with just the 2 options.

So I can never get this straight -- are they mocking religion or the government's protection of freedom of speech? If the latter, does that mean they are sincere religious beliefs and that they really do reject scientific consensus? — swstephe

These people seem over the top. In general (I think) they are taking aim at the liberties afforded to religions which the general population do not have. FSM started as a reaction to teaching creationism in schools, it was the statement 'if you want to teach creationism (your religion) then teach pastafarianims (ours). Here I take the point as, we allow religious people to wear various items in their photos, why is religion special that they are the only ones who can do this, if we allow them an exemption change the rules so that everyone can do it.

@Baden - Got both.

I didn't get one when tiff mentioned me...

@shmik
sorry was curious.

Did you do that to me? Or have I just been an arsehole of my own accord? — Sapientia

Nah you were part of the control group.

Note that I'm just going to ignore the parts where you disagreed with anything I said — Baden

Didn't notice :)
Hey , these issues largely come down to taste so I didn't intend to present an argument just some thoughts.

One possible objection here might be that certain names will inevitably gather certain reputations within the community anyway (and certainly within the minds of individual members). Thus a person with a strong reputation might receive undue deference and a person with a weak reputation might receive undue umbrage.

This does happen and I get the feeling that it's influence is greater than that of rep. It's pretty annoying when you see people get behind a good poster whose made a bad argument. I've never been on a forum that had reps so can't compare what they are like.

Of course I don't think that we should post without names. The point was that in a forum context we can't reach the ideal of looking only at the content of the post and maybe we shouldn't be aiming for it.

In the end theirs nothing really at stake in these discussions. It gives people a chance to voice their opinions but I doubt there has been one person who changed what they wanted to vote for after reading the posts.

There should be no overt signs that could be interpreted as hierarchical or of denoting seniority visible next to members' icons as it may bear the false suggestion that a particular post is more valuable than another for reasons above and beyond its content. — Baden

I heard a story recently. Foucault was in an interview and made the suggestion that for one year the books in France should be published without authors, that people should read the books before being influenced by things outside the text. The point being there are always going to be elements which affect how a post is taken, outside of the post itself. We have the names on the post, we get to see how other people react to the post in their comments, we see how people react to other contributors in general. I don't think I've ever read a post before checking who wrote it, reputation always precedes content. I'm don't actually think anything you said was wrong, just thought that was an interesting aside, how can we speak about this topic and not argue about the role of an author? :)

Anyways, I'm going to put it out there, I like likes. On top of the ability to say 'I agree' without putting superfluous posts in a thread, its nice to let someone know that you liked what they wrote. And it's nice when others like what you write.

Also I completely agree that that rep is a huge problem, it creates a hierarchy and in-groups. At the moment I don't care about the cumulative likes, mostly because I'm already familiar with the posters here so checking the likes won't give me more information about how much weight to give a post. I wouldn't want a new poster to come in an feel somewhat excluded because they don't have any reps.

The uncomfortable side of likes to me is the idea of being trained like one of Skinner's rats. I've long since come to terms with the fact that my posting style has likely has been influenced by likes in ways that I am not aware of. I had this idea a while ago that if you took a normal poster and started 'rewarding' them when they were a bit short with others, sprinkling in some dislikes when they were helpful, you could eventually turn them into an arsehole. Of course we are also heavily influenced by how others interact with us through their posts but it doesn't feel as overt and sinister.

So I'm undecided. First preference is definitely keep likes and remove the counter but for the second preference I lean slightly towards keeping things as they are though I see downsides with it.

Damn it, what am I doing? One more like and I'm in the top 10, I should have written something short and witty instead of this long meandering post.

I used to do a lot of welding, industrial, automotive, house and ship repair. A lot of the time, especially on long heavy welds, you start running on auto-pilot after a while. That gives you plenty of time to contemplate the workings of the universe. — Sir2u

As an aside, I used to work in production and one of the tasks was soldering. If you're doing through-hole soldering then you can do it on autopilot the whole time, it's extremely repetitive. The only upside to the work (besides the money) was that I could listen to my ipod while doing it. I probably listened to over 100 hours of philosophy lectures while soldering. I also managed to get in some law, psychology and almost anything else that would pass the time.

@Soylent There is some difficulty for me when answering your questions. We have very different conceptions of morality being that many of the things you are concerned about don't come up on my radar at all. Not because I miss them but because they don't form part of and are not relevant to my view.
I think morality is something we experience and live through, not something we have knowledge of. We learn how to converse with others not through applications of rules, it's the same with morality.

In your opinion, is particularism a moral theory capable of providing only post hoc judgements or is it that moral judgements are simply carried out while falling short of knowledge? Perhaps, you hold that we cannot eliminate any detail as morally insignificant and so must consider everything, no matter how seemingly trivial. If I am the person hiding a friend in my house, how do I use particularism to tell me what I should do when the murderer comes to my door? Do I need to examine the contents of the murderers pockets? Perhaps I should at least ask to test the weapon first. — Soylent

When I say 'before' I don't really mean it as temporally before I mean it as before you know the details of a situation. If someone knows the details that they are working with they can then be in a position to assess that particular situation.

When we are speaking about hypothetical I can make an assessments but these don't then map
to real world situations. The world is complicated there are thousands of different little things which could change what you think of a situation. What is going to count as a moral reason for doing an action will not come down to minutely detailed list.

The perhaps is going to depend on details. But you have missed the whole point of the sentence which is that under certain circumstances the fact that you are lying my not even be a point against doing an action.

My worry is that without a principle, we are aimless in our discerning the particulars as morally significant or morally insignificant. — Soylent

I don't have this issue. Also I am not calling for an abandonment of all moral reasoning all together. We still hear about it from other people. "It was OK to lie then because if you didn't Barry would probably have told his wife about it. Since she works with Mitch and it could be a pain for him if she found out that..." Whatever it is, I'm just say that the principles take these reasons and try to apply them like a hammer, flattening out all differences.

Moral judgements shift from being about knowledge to being part of the skills we use in dealing with the world.

Yeh I've been obsessed with the concept and have had death anxiety since I was a kid. In part this is another way to deal with it.

Yeh I guess I was questioning that. When people say 'society will be better off' it's hard to know what the hell they're talking about. He doesn't mean that the quality of life in my city will improve with some extra welders.

If you listen to podcasts there was an episode of Science Vs which went through some research on happiness.

Anyway all this talk doesn't mean much, I can't even imagine a context where a politician would make that statement. Is Florida overflowing with philosophers at the moment? I remember reading a while ago about the value of different jobs. Bankers and tax accountants were found to have a destructive net value whilst hospital cleaners created a lot of value. Still you don't hear politicians advocating for us to become janitors.
EDIT: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/dec/14/new-economics-foundation-social-value

Hey Sapientia,

Do we need more welders and less philosophers? — Sapientia

I guess who is 'we' and what is the nature of the need? I don't need another welder or another philosopher. Of course plenty of people believe that unless you are contributing to capitalism by earning and spending more or being part of production then you are not reaching your potential.

But how much money - if any - is required to live a good life? — Sapientia

Research does change somewhat over time, the last I read was that your happiness increases with your income until it reaches a certain threshold (I think it was around $75k in the US) and after that doesn't increase with income. The hypothesis was that money normally plays a negative role on your happiness, once the stress of not having enough disappears then extra money doesn't make too much difference. Some people that are very wealthy have more happiness because of it, not because of spending it but because it contributes to their satisfaction that they have had success.

One more thing, happiness has a very large genetic. To live the good life its a start to have good genes.

Not really a loved one but it's a constant companion.

How does one become "morally attuned" and have "moral reasons" if not by applying moral principles?
Surely you mean the morally significant specifics of a situation are primary. The position of Jupiter probably doesn't matter when you're acting, unless the position has become morally significant (e.g., Astronauts travelling to Jupiter). How do we discern morally significant specifics from morally insignificant specifics under particularism? — Soylent

I'm not sure about the origins, it doesn't really bother me much, we get socialized.

I actually disagree that we can know before a situation what will be morally significant and what won't be. I could easily throw your example back at you. How did you decide that the position of Jupiter is morally significant if astronauts are traveling there. I'm guessing that you're not relying on a rule you learned about traveling to Jupiter or any other planet.

Cool site though it's not strictly accurate, try Sam Harris yourself.

It take 13 clicks from "Getting to philosophy" according to the article Getting to philosophy.

Sam Harris - 22 clicks X-)

The Australian government would help. We love helping your government and following it into war. Also it would be our honor to help your government to bring democracy and freedom to its citizens.

I'm pretty happy that people on the forum can't reach through the screen and stab each other with some kind of knife emoticon. There's a small chance it would make us more polite but it would drastically increase the chances of being stabbed.

It's a little weird with these thread creations. I thought this conversation was one of those fooling around, not taking it too seriously ones.

I have never been in a situation where 'action' was necessary. The whole idea is pretty bizarre to me. I've never had the thought 'I wish someone here was carrying a gun'. My folks had their house burgled a few years ago. My mum came home to find the intruder inside. The intruder grabbed a screwdriver and threatened her from across the room not to do anything, so she ran out of the house. As traumatizing as that was I'm pretty happy that the most dangerous weapon involved was a screwdriver. Also happy that my mum was non armed, the idea of shooting the guy would be completely messed up. I actually felt a bit sorry for him, he got more than an extra year in prison for the assault charges. Just panicking and grabbing a screwdriver will get you that much jail time even if you don't intend to use it.

http://postimage.org
There are a bunch of other sites like that. You can use it or just google 'upload images'. You upload images to the site and it will create a link so you can post them to the forum.

Don't have much to add, just read the paper and checking in. I found it quite difficult.

In brief I gathered his argument was that if we have a theory of truth then we don't need any of the other back-end stuff that we normally assume is necessary. Take for example "Socrates flies". Traditionally we would break that up into "Socrates" refers to Socrates and the predicate "x flies" is true if x flies. Davidson is arguing that this whole story is irrelevant. Whether we adopt the causal theory of reference or the descriptive theory of reference or don't use a theory at all, it doesn't matter as long as all the same sentences come out true.

Hey , maybe the problem exists with your version of truth or certainty. To believe something is not the same as knowing without any doubt that it's falsity is impossible. You don't even need to look at examples where the laws of physics suddenly change. Rather, we can inspect normal situations.

Let's say you leave your house to drive to work. You get into your car and find that the battery is flat. When you get to work late it wouldn't make any sense if your boss told you that you should have been prepared earlier in case your car didn't start and you needed to take the train. It doesn't make sense for him to claim that your belief that you would be able to drive to work was irrational because there was the possibility that your battery was flat.

Edit: if that happened we would be calling your boss the irrational one.

About a year ago I met an American who was generally on the left. He thought that the U.S. would be better off with gun control and agreed with lots of the reasoning for it. He also maintained that if the police came to his property to confiscate his guns he would fire at them. It was amazing to me, he was self reflective about it and knew it sounded crazy yet insisted that he'd do it anyway. You can't find people like that in Australia, one of the joys of travelling.

The solution is here to understand when some part of history is politically charged, too close to some actor pushing an agenda and inviting some historians to promote this view, and when it's really only historians debating history without much other interests. — ssu

Yes unfortunately many of the interesting issue are politically charged. And it's not like the ones that are not have never been, it's just that we have settled on a narrative for them.

Perhaps a thread on the ramifications of 100% voter turnout. — Monitor

Voter turnout in Australia is ~93% it's still the same stuff. You get one of the 2 major parties, they make the decisions.

There were tradeoffs to be made in the decision to invade, or not (from our side) and the decision to surrender, or not (from the Japanese side). No one could be sure at the time which course would be most favorable. — Bitter Crank

A lot of the historians in the article are arguing that the narrative of the trade off between land invasion and atom bomb is just political spin.

In short, there is no 'objective frame' from which one can approach narrativizing history, but one is always re-appropriating the past along with one's ideological baggage, and the baggage of the present. — Shevek

Hey Shevek nice post, the problem is that it describes our actions. With certain issues my worldview is ill-formed and somewhat sceptical. I'm not necessarily concerned with an objective past, more what the hell do I do with the information. Read a bunch and assume it will culminate into a story that appeals to me?

Yeh, I've had the same issues trying to work things out in the Israel-Palestine Conflict. Also it's not only history but science, for instance do mobile phones cause cancer? There was some time where it was difficult to get information about climate change and various other issues. The method you are talking about is probably what I do naturally, look at different sources, dismiss some as overly biased and imagine that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The thing is this could be my own bias middle-ground-bias (henceforth MGB). The extreme views are more likely to use bad arguments and twist some facts, but this doesn't actually mean that they are. MGB clearly fails with climate change. Also as John Oliver pointed out, it's easy for the media to present two sides of an issue by presenting 2 scientist or 2 historians in a debate to give us the feeling that there is an even split amongst the experts.
Appearing less partisan is itself a persuasive technique, one that I fall for.

Hey @Sapientia I'd also be interested in joining in the discussion. I haven't read the prolegomena but have read bits of CPR and some secondary literature. Is there anything more specific that you want to discuss? You've pretty much put up the outline of his entire project.

My overall views are that he's kind of insane. There are some extremely elaborate arguments with crazy moves left and right. I like some of his critiques of other philosophers but in the end almost everything he says is wrong/untrue.

(1) How is pure mathematics possible?
(2) How is pure natural science possible?
(3) How is metaphysics possible in general?
(4) How is metaphysics possible as a science? — Kant

1) Some things to consider. Mathematics can be considered a language so working out whether 7+5=12 could be viewed as knowing the grammar of the language. Obviously this view would depend on your philosophy of language, but if it seems correct then 7+5=12 doesn't really fit anywhere in Kant's framework.
One of the issues is that, for Kant, formal logic had not been invented yet. His examples of analytic truths (as far as I can remember) are of the form A=P&Q (Bachelor = Unmarried Man) Therefore if I know A I know P, and I know Q. In logic we use many more rules than this, so Kant's 'analytic' definition is quite limited.

I could comment on 2)3)&4) but I don't think they are possible in the way that Kant thinks they are. Not sure what you are looking for. You probably need to focus the thread more for people to get involved.

I actually like the freedom to do anything, it's just that it doesn't end up looking good. Are you interested in putting up any of your own work, I'm curious.

@John Thanks.

Shmik has made some decisions about where to change from one shade of grey to another, something that I struggle to do because it's somewhat arbitrary, but it makes for a better overall effect than trying to make all the transitions accurate and smooth. — bert1

"Decisions" you give me too much credit :) I'm still learning and can't mix the colors that I want as acrylic paint gets slightly darker as it dries. For that painting I premixed a bunch of shades before starting (I think it was 9), so while I was painting I didn't have much choice in the matter.

I'm still a beginner at painting, this was my attempt at a self portrait, left unfinished because I couldn't do the hair at all.

To be honest, the quote is unclear to me, so I can't honestly say how much it does in overcoming my conception of art. — Thorongil

Well it's not about overcoming it with any sort of proof or argument. Rather it's a statement about trying to understand art whilst ignoring the point of view of the artist. That even though it's strange does not make it random and meaningless. Also that it's possible to have an appreciation of it even if it doesn't make sense to us.

Personally I think your view is extremely strange, much more than a piece canvas splattered with paint. Outside of the context of the philosophical tradition, I could write off the concept of platonic ideas as some kind of madness or mysticism. Yet I can still count it as philosophy (rather than mysticism) because I can situate it as part of a tradition and I can try to understand the view you are coming from.

Again this not an argument against your position. I can't argue against your position, its too incongruous with mine.

I don't really get your position. I can't see how you are arguing for an ideational theory of meaning.

We learn ostensively, learning by examples then constructing a rule (necessary and sufficient conditions) that admits of those examples. — invizzy

Not consciously maybe, but if knowing a meaning is knowing the rule, then thinking 'would I use the word "car" to describe this' IS comparing your thought to the rule (i.e, a checklist of necessary and sufficient conditions) — invizzy

If knowing a meaning is knowing a rule then where do ideas 'private and independent of language' come in.

It would help if you made an example of how ideas connect with rules which connect with language on both the part of a speaker and listener. i.e the idea in the Jim's head is converted into language by ... which is then... which is then converted into an into an idea in Bob's head for him to understand it. Or something like that.

This may not be critical; it's the first thing that comes to mind.

The kind of ideas that an idea theory of meaning requires seem to be created after the fact and therefore don't have explanatory value. Concentrating specifically on a mental grouping with necessary and sufficient conditions. Let's take the example 'car'. By your very hypothesis there is no separation between the idea of a car and all the ways we use the word car.
Why is it that we have the idea car? It's obvious that when we learnt the idea we were not initially told the necessary and sufficient conditions for something to fit with that idea. Why are a 2 seated sports car and a 5 seated sedan both considered cars but a van isn't. The answer is that our language treats them differently rather than them being natural ideas we had which we tried to explain with language.

So the idea of a car is derivative on all the way we use the word in language not the cause of us using those words. If I show you some pictures and ask 'is this one a car?', 'is this one a car'. To find your answers you think to yourself 'would I use the word car to describe this'. You don't run through a mental checklist of conditions necessary and sufficient conditions.

Let's say that we run through the above exercise where I show pictures. Before the exercise I could ask you to list the necessary and sufficient conditions for an object to be a chair. Inevitably there will come some pictures which you would use the word chair to describe but don't fit the list of conditions. There is a question of how you react to these examples, will you argue that we have been using the word chair incorrectly as the object does not fit your conditions or will you change the list of conditions to make them inclusive the object pictured.

To hold your view you must state that the former is impossible because we can't use the word 'chair' if it doesn't fit our idea specifically because the word is used to express the idea. The latter is also impossible because then we need to say that we don't have a complete idea of a chair with all its necessary and sufficient conditions when we use the word. It's admitting that we can only work out the necessary and sufficient conditions from inspecting the way we use the word.

In the end what this comes down to is questioning whether this idea exists. I can't find it in the phenomenology of my use of language. If we can only get to the ideas by inspecting our use of language how can they explain our understanding of language. Finally how do I understand ideas? If I have some kind of direct way of understanding them what is it about them that allows for it but doesn't allow for a direct way of understanding sentences without ideas as an intermediary?

Some more simple questions. What is the idea behind the meaning of 'hello'? What is the idea of '5723'?

@Thorongil
I wasn't planning on getting involved with this conversation as I don't know much about art. I was just listening to danielcoffeens podcast episode - Deleuze and Guattari's 'What is Philosophy' and he spoke specifically about Pollack and comparing it to the way we think of philosophy.

I remembered just how strange philosophy is, you know, and you can say you really get Deleuze and Guattari or your really get Nietzsche. But there are enormous components that I find incomprehensible and bizarre and have no frikkin Idea what they are talking about. That's true with every philosopher for everybody. You know, for the greatest Kantian expert there are still moments that are just strange, you might have an explanation about what's going on there but the fact is every philosophy is very strange. Only through the institutional practices of normalizing it does it become something we can even talk about sanely and not sound like lunatics.

It's the same with art, you look at Pollack and he is scattering this paint on a canvas and your thinking 'what the hell are you doing dude, what the hell are you doing?' Or your look at an elaborate luscious classical scene of rape which seems to be a very common theme to a certain time... What a strange thing to do. But within an institution of art, somehow within this field of immanence or the field of affective perceptual practice that Pollack operates in, scattering paint on a canvas, putting the canvas on the floor, not looking at anything but the canvas right, not looking at an object to portray it. Overcoming all mimetic aspects or components of art, just to make art an event of splattering paint on a canvas over and against any object, the object is the paint, the object is the canvas right. There is no other object other than the act of painting, well that makes perfect sense from the perspective of Jackson Pollack and studying the history of modern art we can say 'yes, this make sense'. It's the same with philosophy, philosophy is very strange it's very personal it's very idiosyncratic... — Rough Transcription

In this way it makes sense specifically as a reaction, comment or overcoming of your view that art needs to be representational.

All people cross culturally should receive increased fines as the current value is not enough of a deterrent.

It's obvious that the argument that I made above is bad, it treats peoples attitudes as if they are the same in all cultures, it isn't backed up by any empirical evidence and it's claiming to fix a problem without any indication that the problem exists.

The rich are not, despite the prevalent view here, inherently bad. — Hanover

I agree there often are anti-rich undertones in these types of discussions.

I want to re-frame the question away from fines being meant to sting. This approach mostly comes into play after people have received a fine, but the point of the cameras/cops is stop the behaviors that result in the issuing of fines in the first place. Ideally I wouldn't even say fines are meant to deter, their final goal (besides the revenue, lots and lots of revenue) is to create safer roads, deterring specific behaviors may or may not achieve this.
If we do concentrate on deterrence, is there research to indicate that the wealthy are not being deterred? Any evidence that shows that cross culturally the wealthy are more likely to breach the road rules and that the major factor is the comparatively low sting of the fine? Is there actually a real problem of the unsafe driving of the wealthy that needs to be addressed?

Part of the reason why the argument in the OP is more convincing than the argument at the top of my post it because it can give us a sense of indignation. The fines hurt me so it seems unfair that there are others who don't feel that same sting.

Hey , sorry for the late reply I've been spending too much time here procrastinating so cutting down a little until after my exams.
If I knew the language of my initial post would have caused as much discussion I would have been more careful with the wording.

In your initial post you had stated in reference to the actual denizens of future generations that "we cannot actually refer to them (as beings)...we can care about them in the same way that we can care about the characters in Harry Potter". I think it is interesting to consider whether, in order for your statements to be true, they must not do the very thing they claim to be impossible, namely, refer to the set of actual individuals that our statements allegedly cannot refer to. — Aaron R

Yes there is an issue here and I'm not sure how to deal with it. For instance I don't think there is a problem with saying that 'the population of Australia will be under 10 million people in the year 2115'.

I think it's likely that we can care about the situation but not about the people involved in it.

I would argue that the main difference is that I can take actions today that have causal implications for the well-being of the denizens of future generations in a way that is obviously not possible with respect to fictional characters like Harry Potter (and therefore we might also feel responsible for what happens to those individuals in a way we wouldn't with respect to fictional characters). — Aaron R

I agree that we don't care about them in the exact same way that we care about fictional character from Harry Potter. When I wrote that I was anticipating the response 'if they are fictional how can we care about them'. A much closer comparison would be if I told you a news story. I show a picture and tell you about a child that was forced into marriage at the age of 11. The Husband was alcoholic and abusive etc. We can feel empathetic towards this child even if unknown to us the news story is a complete fiction, something I just made up. We think we are feeling empathetic to an actual person but we are not.
This is also something we cannot do for HP even though it is also fictional. I understand that this example is different from yours in that we cannot change the situation but I don't think that's critical. My general hypothesis that I am working with here is that in order to feel empathetic towards people we need to have some contact with them or be told a story about them. I'm not sure if you find that to be the case with yourself. The second part is to say that whatever story we tell ourselves about the individuals existing in 100 years time is fictional.

If you think that we don't need a story in order to feel empathy towards people then my logic fails. And I really don't think your millionaire can care about the person who receives his money.

I'm not taking it as that negative. They want to stop you posting for now but are not (at least for the moment) outright banning you. It's a pretty diplomatic measure.