We can judge that it is raining, but this does not mean that that it is raining is a judgment.

Likewise we can judge that something is good, but this does not mean that that something is good is a judgment.

We can make judgments both about whether it is raining, and whether something is good, correct?

My question is, why does the fact that we only find judgments about whether something is good in individuals, tell us anything about whether things are only good to some S?

Let's try again.

Look at these two arguments side by side.

Argument 1:

-We only find judgments about whether it is raining in individuals.
-Therefore, it is only ever raining to some S.

Argument 2:

-We only find judgments about whether something is good in individuals.
-Therefore something is only ever good to some S.

As I understand it, your claim is that Argument 1 is bad, while Argument 2 is good.

Why?

Why is the rain argument bad, but the goodness argument good? They have the exact same form.

OK, so what do you think of the edited argument?

Great. So we agree this is a bad argument.

Yet this seems to be the very argument you provided, for why things are only ever good to some S.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/252711

It looks like your argument was bad, so we have to throw it out.

Now, we come back to the original question again:

What is your reason for believing that things are only ever good to some S?

OK, now I'm going to present a similarly structured argument.

-We only find judgments about whether something is good in individuals.
-Therefore, things are only ever good to some S.

Is this a good argument?

So we agree that the fact that we only find judgments about whether it's raining in individuals, does not establish that it is only ever raining to some S?

I am asking you whether the argument in this post:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/252725

Gives us good reason to believe that it's only ever raining for some S. If I presented you with that argument, would you find it convincing? Why or why not?

Yes, but I never claimed otherwise.

Now can you please respond to my previous question, about whether the argument I gave, about how it is only ever raining to some S, is a good argument?

No. We can make a judgment about whether it's raining, but whether it's raining is a fact about water, the sky, and so on.

No, nor have I ever implied this.

Can you please answer my most recent question now?

Let's try again.

Suppose I gave the following argument to you:

-We only find judgments about whether it is raining in individuals.
-Therefore, it is only ever raining to some S.

Is this is good argument?

I don't see the relevance of the question.

Let's try again.

You said things are only good to some S or other.

When asked why, you said that the reason for believing this is that judgments about what is good are only found in individuals.

But then I noted that all judgments are only found in individuals.

If that judgment that something is P is only found in an individual is not a reason for believing that something can be P only to some S, say in the case of whether it's raining, then it equally cannot be a reason for believing this in the case of goodness.

In other words, the reasoning in the raining and good case are parallel.

So what you're saying is that, for example, it is only raining or not raining, to S?

So are you saying that all judgments are only 'to some S?'

Aren't judgments about anything only found in individual activity?

So what's the evidence that good is always good to some S?

Why do we say that things are good, then, without specifying for who? Are we all just deluded?

Says who? We can just say something is good. We don't need to specify a 'to someone.'

OK, but we're not talking about what's good to S, we're talking about what's good.

Good to x? Aren't we talking about what's good? Where did the to x come from?

Is it possible to approve of something that's not good? Yes.

Therefore, it cannot be that what is good is what one approves of.

There are a couple features of good that are analyzable:

First, goodness is gradable. Hence the comparative and superlative forms, better and best, and extreme forms like great and excellent, which imply good but not vice-versa.

Second, goodness might have a scalar structure with a maximal endpoint. Plausibly, this is denoted by words like perfect (i.e., 'that which can't be better'). Of course that doesn't tell us for any particular thing whether it can be perfect, just that goodness in principle can admit of such endpoints.

Third, goodness is apparently not relativized to anyone in its ordinary uses. So when one person says 'this is good,' and another says 'this is not good,' they can contradict each other, be reported as disagreeing, etc. This is hard to explain if good means good for x and in most such disagreements the value of x differs across the claimants.

Fourth, goodness can nonetheless be overtly relativized, as in good for him (with something that is good for him perhaps not being good for me).

Fifth, goodness apparently does not track personal preferences. So there is no contradiction in claiming that something is good, even though one isn't pleased by it, doesn't like it, etc. Claiming that something is good often implies that one approves of it, etc. but apparently this is because we approve of things that are good, not because things are good in virtue of our approving of them.

Sixth, goodness, whether it can be reduced to any natural property or not, apparently must supervene on such properties. Thus, it is contradictory to take two situations totally identical in their descriptive or natural qualities, and claim that one is good while the other is not. Goodness cannot be a free-floating quality that the exact same descriptive situation can have or fail to have: rather, things must be good in virtue of those qualities.

Another one:

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/audience/david-whitley/os-ae-orlando-name-david-whitley-0622-story.html

"Another theory is that a politician named J.G. Speer loved Shakespeare and named the city after a character in the play “As You Like It.”

If that one’s true, we should be grateful Speer wasn’t a huge fan of “Hamlet” or Orlando might have been named Guildenstern."

[mod edit]

Andrewk, please look at the title of this fucking article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/twitter-might-have-been-named-friendstalker/281380/

Now what is something that is 'not a normal part of language' doing as the headline of an article, said out of the blue?

Not to mention, the idea that one can only analyze found examples of sentences, and not constructed ones, is totally asinine. It would be like insisting that one cannot observe natural phenomena in constructed experimental environments, but only must account for what 'naturally occurs' by chance outside of a laboratory.

And this on the heels of your constructing elaborate examples of made-up conversations that have actually never happened.

I'm sorry, this whole thing is just so utterly bizarre.

Perfectly normal? Have you ever heard somebody say such a thing out of the blue? — andrewk

Yes! Parents talk about naming their kids all the time, and what names they would have had if such-and-such!

All I can say is that, if you regard that as a perfectly normal sentence when uttered in isolation, your life experience of conversation must have been radically different from mine. — andrewk

You've never fucking heard people talk about counterfactual situations in which someone has a different name?

There are certainly longer statements that bear some superficial similarity to it, that one could imagine being used (eg Pat says 'Oh Richard, I do love you and want to marry you, but I wish you had a Scottish name like McGillicuddy instead of plain old Nixon. I always fancied having a long, exotic last name') — andrewk

So let me get this straight. You get to pull entire made up conversations out of your ass, but simple sentences are just too bizarre to warrant analysis.

(2) as stated and in isolation, it would be extraordinary for somebody to say it — andrewk

How????

It is not part of normal language, — andrewk

According to who??? What on Earth is in any way strange about those sentences???

This is the most baffling thing I've ever heard. Where the hell do you get these intuitions that perfectly normal sentences are things that we can't analyze for some reason?

How about, "John could have been named Andrew?"

Or what about "John would have been named Andrew, if his parents picked a different name?"

Do you seriously not understand these sentences?

Stop.

I made a mistake re-entering this thread. Just got mad again. See you later once more.

One day, one day, people will read. I dream of that day. Til then ciao.

But don't critique a sentence that nobody has written. — andrewk

You literally invented an entire imaginary conversation in your post! Are you for real?

Are you seriously implying that no one can look at novel sentences of a language that they haven't found in an actual corpus or conversation?

Even if that were true, you're still wrong, because there are examples of these constructions! You just did not even bother to look for them before making up nonsense claims about what people do and do not say!

Take the fucking L, man.

Holy shit, keep reading. There's an example with a proper name subject right there.

READ.

Here is a live example of an English user, outside of a philosophical context, doing exactly what andrewk says one never would. We should all be so lucky to have people around telling us what we do and don't, or can and cannot say, and that any suggesiton to the contrary is 'being up one's own fundament.'

https://imgur.com/a/1D0QNp6

Please, let's move on.

What the hell are you talking about?

The point is that there is one predicted reading of the sentence that is contradictory if one thinks "Nixon" means the same as "the individual named Nixon." Insofar as that sentence apparently does not have a contradictory reading, this is a wrong prediction. You could, I suppose, argue that it does have such a reading.

The bad de dicto reading is if you don't use the indexical.