I think something like this. All ethical inquiry consists in reasoning about what to do. This includes what it means to do something right (is this thing I do ok? is it good?), what justifications are adequate ethical motivation (consequences, duties...), or abstract properties of ethical behaviour (is it rational, emotive...). — fdrake

Well, thinking about what to do would be practicing ethics (of course, not all decisions are ethical decisions, but I am assuming we are talking specifically about the latter here.) The rest would indeed be what constitutes ethical inquiry.

If the way someone thinks about the abstract properties or adequate justifications has no influence on how they live their lives - what might be called practical applications - then the system of abstract properties and demarcation between adequate and inadequate justifications is entirely abstracted from attempts to live a good life. — fdrake

Yes, and?... You imply (and say explicitly in elsewhere) that there is something wrong with that. I am trying to understand why you think so. Why is it wrong to pursue an inquiry into ethics for reasons other than helping yourself make the right choices? For example, out of the love of wisdom (you know, philosophy)?

I am speaking, by the way, as someone who is skeptical of ethical systems. But not of meta-ethics - after all, my skepticism is itself a meta-ethical position. As is perhaps your stance here as well.

Your thesis that no discourse about ethics is admissible unless it is aimed at helping us making ethical decisions in our daily life seems bizarre to me. Can you motivate it? Is there some more general principle of which this is a consequence, or is ethics a special case?

What's your stance on other intellectual endeavors, such as science - must they all have immediate practical consequences? I suppose an alchemist that wants to get rich by transmuting base metals into gold would be OK in your book, but a chemistry professor who has no intention of putting his studies of chemistry into actual practice is a fool and a charlatan. And of course, philosophy of science would be doubly sterile - a pointless inquiry into a pointless study.

Or did I get your completely wrong?

It seems that you haven't made much progress in developing your argument, so let me try to prod you along, starting with premise 2: There is objective morality.

You have gestured towards an argument with your references to moral evils, such as the Holocaust. This is a common road to take for those advocating "objective morality," and it generally takes the form of an ad hominem. Now, don't cringe: ad hominem is not necessarily something bad and fallacious; it can be an effective strategy in an argument. In this context it means just this: Suppose you have a contested thesis, such as your premise (2). You then show by way of an argument that rejecting this thesis inevitably leads to accepting some proposition that most people would be loath to accept (e.g. "Perpetrating the Holocaust was not wrong.") Now your opponents face a dilemma: either they concede and accept your thesis or they bite the bullet and accept the unpalatable consequences of rejecting that thesis.

So let's take me for example. I am strongly convinced that the Holocaust was an evil. (And I also think that any person ought to have this attitude, not just me.) At the same time, let's say that I do not believe in "objective morality" (if nothing else then because I don't have a very clear idea of what it is.) But I am not laying any other cards on the table: I am not claiming a commitment to any particular system of morality, nor for that matter any other metaphysical system.

So how am I wrong? Based on what I said above, am I committing myself to some untenable position? Or perhaps I really do believe in (what you take to be) "objective morality" without realizing it?

as said in (2) - without further measurements and observations, there is a 50% chance that any of the two possibilities is true. — Henri

This is really exasperating. Three times I challenged you defend your premise - and you respond by repeating it, almost word-for-word, still without providing any reasoning.

You can point to some reasoning that justifies premise (2). I don't know how I can make this point any clearer than I have already done.

I am talking specifically about premise (2), and no, it is not "confirmed" by anything, as far as I can see. If I missed some reasoning, please point it out for me.

Problem with yours and other poster's (fdrake) answer is that you stop at premise (2), as it seems. — Henri

Well, if there is a problem with a premise, there is no point in going further until that problem is addressed. As it is, your premise comes out of the blue with no justification whatsoever, so there is no reason to accept it.

I didn't vote. The options of "too strict" and "not strict enough" are too broad to be meaningful. Besides, since posts are deleted and edited stealthily, it is difficult to see how much moderation is actually taking place. I've seen some examples of questionable and petty moderation decisions, but for all I know those may have been exceptions.

Anyway, I've made my more specific complaint elsewhere.

That still doesn't make sense, but no matter. I see that people are largely satisfied with the forum as it is, and that shit-posting will continue unchecked.

A man and a dog walk into a bar.
Barman: Sorry, dogs aren't allowed.
Man: But it's not an ordinary dog, it is a talking dog!
Barman: Oh yeah?
Man: Let me show you (to the dog): What's the outside of a tree?
Dog: Bark!
Barman: Yeah, I see where this is going...
Man: Wait, here's another: What's on top of a house?
Dog: Roof!
Barman: OK, you've had your fun...
Man: Why don't you try?
Barman: Fine. Who is the greatest 20th century composer?
Dog: Orff!
Barman: Get out of here, both of you, and don't come back!
The man and the dog turn to leave. At the door the dog turns around and says: You think it's Shostakovich?

I don't disagree in general, but we should acknowledge that we share much of what we call human nature with other animals. — T Clark

Come now, you won't say that nothing distinguishes our cognitive faculties from those of other species, or that there is a smooth transition? But sure, we ought to have a lot in common with other animals, and psychology should not be an exception. I would be careful about the theory of the "primitive brain" overlayed by higher functions though - I understand that contemporary science paints a more complicated and nuanced picture. It's "almost" as if there was no general architectural plan at work, and things rather developed in a messy ad hoc fashion.

1. Beethoven's String Quartet in A minor Opus 132, especially "Molto Adagio; Andante", the 3rd movement.
2. Beethoven's Piano Sonata Op 109 and Op 111
3. Schubert's String Quintet D.956, especially the 2nd movement, the adagio. Oh, and Schubert 's Piano Sonata D 960 in b-flat major. — Beebert

Oh god... musical orgasm!

You must love the opening movement of Beethoven's 5th piano concerto, am I right?

Carmina Burana by Carl Orff — Bitter Crank

I have a terrible memory for names, but there's this silly old joke that helps me remember Orff's. Do you know the one?

4. Bach - Cello Suite #1 Prelude - There's a singular beauty to Bach's lone cello exploring this musical territory on its own. It is the awakening of the human voice without, of course, an actual human voice. — Brian

Bach is the (unrequited :P) love of my life, and the solo cello and violin works are at the top of my list. I never tire of hearing them and replaying them in my head.

Sorry, I can't say anything "philosophical" here - I am a complete savage when it comes to art.

Right, I understand and agree. But the nature vs. nurture debate is not really about whether people have any mental traits and predispositions in common with each other and at variance with other animals - the debate usually concerns the degree to which our predispositions are innate, how flexible they are, how important their role is, etc.

The level of absurd posts in the philosophy of science is an example of where this gap is clear that causes me to avoid it. — TimeLine

Yeah, that's basically my concern. @Bitter Crank made light of the way I had put it elsewhere, but I don't think that my stance is ridiculous. If people start to avoid a forum, that's a problem.

A more interesting question would be, 'what are you trying to do on the site?' — unenlightened

To communicate with people like yourself, on subjects more-or-less philosophical.

I'm out to make the world substantially better — unenlightened

Yikes! I take back my words :P

I think for something to count as human nature it has to be something innate while simultaneously pointing to or articulating what is fundamentally distinctive about us (so DNA is completely useless). — bloodninja

I wonder why you think that "DNA completely useless," but let's set aside DNA for a moment. DNA is a specific biological mechanism of inheritance and expression of traits. All we really need to know is that there are inherited traits that humans express at variance with other animals, that set us apart as a distinctive species. Is that all that you are saying? That's rather obvious, and I can't imagine anyone denying it.

Examples of this innate human nature are Plato's tripartite theory of the human soul, Aristotle's claim that man is the rational animal, Chomsky's ideas about language, perhaps Nietzsche's the will to power, etc. — bloodninja

If I understand you correctly, you are referring to general features of human psychology ("psyche," "spirit," "soul," etc.). And to say that people have "human nature" is just to say that there are such generalizable characteristics that are shared by all, or almost all people. Is that about right? That too seems pretty uncontroversial, as long as you don't get into specifics. Does anyone really deny that?

The difference between possessing an innate nature and not is that if the former is true then we can ground our moral claims and give them strong normative force. If the latter is true, and there is no innate human nature, then it appears that we have nothing to ground our moral claims in so they have weak normative force; we would be a social construction just like the socially constructed moral claims. Morality would be completely meaningless and arbitrary. To the question why be good? there would be no sufficient answer. I hope this clears things up — bloodninja

No, sorry. Here you are just restating your original thesis: that HN (whatever that is) is a necessary precondition for genuine morality. If HN is as I understood you to mean, then HN is such an obvious and uncontroversial fact, so bound up with our background knowledge about the world and ourselves, that it is hard to even separate it out, so that we could evaluate its specific relationship with morality. You may as well say that for there to be human morality there have to be humans.

Your ideal solution is not going to happen, and, lacking that, your method would lead to more of the kind of thing that you're complaining about. We need to be pragmatic about this — Sapientia

I don't understand what you mean. What is my "ideal solution" and my "method," respectively (you imply that these are two distinct things)?

It was not my intention to debate crackpots. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The problem with that is that all discussions appear on the main page, irrespective of category (unless you manually turn them off here). So moving bad discussions into a "Rubbish" category wouldn't really make much difference for most people. — Michael

That can be seen as giving more options to people. Those who prefer a more curated experience could either browse specific subforums or filter out what they don't want to see on the front page. On the other hand, casual visitors may be turned off by what they see.

Philosophy of science deals with the nature of theory, of evidence, of confirmation, the nature of induction, of confidence and certainty. It is a branch of the theory of knowledge. — Srap Tasmaner

I understand that that's where your interests lie, but I wouldn't be so restrictive. Science informs metaphysics, and conversely, metaphysical underpinnings can be seen in scientific theories and scientific debates. There are also what may be seen as strictly scientific issues that nonetheless can benefit from the attention of philosophers, simply because philosophers have dealt with such issues before (e.g. observer selection issues in cosmology).

I agree with myself :) What made you think I wouldn't? I still think that one or two subforums where "non-standard" posts could be moved would be preferable to deletion. I dislike heavy-handed moderation, but I have come to believe that some kind of curation is necessary for a forum like this.

By "dying" I mostly mean degrading. There is a large and thriving community in Youtube comments, for what that is worth. Yes, messages are still being posted, but the intellectual life seems to be seeping out little by little.

It seems to be the case that the majority of people on here don't think there is a "human nature" as such. — bloodninja

Really? What do you mean by "human nature," anyway? What would be the difference between possessing and not possessing "human nature?"

It may just mean that this forum, and web forums like this, are dying. Perhaps they really are past due, like the BBS or Usenet of old (anyone still remember those?)

"A line is infinitely divisible" which is a finitely describable definition of a rule

with

"A line has an infinite number of segments" which cannot be represented in our syntax. — sime

I have read what you have written in this thread up to this point, and I still don't see what difference you are getting at here.

And I cannot think of a compelling reason to see the axiom of infinity is anything other than a meaningless syntactical rule for manipulating finite syntax that represents nothing and lacks real world application , with the possible exception of representing things that are not infinite. — sime

What makes you think so? The mathematics that is usually thought of as relying on such notions - mathematical analysis, linear algebra, etc. - is extremely useful for describing the real world. One could make the argument that the same could be accomplished without recourse to infinities - that's what the finitist project is about. But whatever one thinks of the successes and the prospects of that project, it can't take away the fact that standard mathematics has many real-world applications.

Correct, so I guess the claim is they are two radically different categories then, and that the former theory of ontological sameness is itself incorrect based on its radical difference that cannot be explained by heaping on yet more physical theories. — schopenhauer1

And like I said, just stating the claim is not informative or productive. "Mental," "physical" - these are just words that don't stand in relation to anything in particular, until you unpack them and show how you use them in ways to which we all could relate. It's quite possible that, given your meaning, the claim is true, and even banal and self-evident. And then there would be no argument, because those who think that mental could emerge from physical obviously mean something else.

Claim: Emergence only works from physical to physical events. Emergence is incoherent from physical to mental events. Thoughts? — schopenhauer1

Depends on what one means by mental events, I guess. Such canned statements are pretty meaningless without showing what philosophical scaffolding underlies them.

If you think of mental and physical as belonging to the same ontological category, then there is nothing strange about the idea of the relationship of emergence holding between them. If you frame these two concepts as belonging to radically different categories, then of course the idea of emergence will be incoherent.

You don't understand what he is talking about. If you don't understand something, it is better to ask than to try and fake it, otherwise you will just look foolish. The issue that apo is alluding to has nothing to do with fractals (measuring the coastline) or with "digits," with which you've become obsessed. It's historically known as The Ultraviolet Catastrophe - look it up.

Small problem. Nature turns out to be quantum. There is a fixed fundamental grain of action and dimension. So spacetime and energy are discrete and not continuous at the bottom-most scale of things. — apokrisis

So, two things: First, to say that "nature turns out to be quantum" because of such-and-such features that allegedly lie at the "bottom-most scale of things" is a thoroughly reductionist statement (and - oh horrors - bottom-up reductionist!) Which is ironic, given how apo likes to carp about reductionism. So nature cannot be anything above and beyond what said "bottom-most scale" expresses - not really. Now, I am not necessarily objecting to this view - just highlighting its philosophical presuppositions, which no one is obligated to accept on faith.

Second, it's just not true. If you are a reductionist and you are going to bet your metaphysics on today's quantum physics, then there is nothing there that says that "spacetime and energy are discrete and not continuous at the bottom-most scale of things." This is well-known to anyone who studied quantum physics to any extent, so I won't even go into this. There are some speculative developments that seek to quantize spacetime at the fundamental level, but so far they have not been successful, and they certainly do not constitute the theory as it stands now.

Nevertheless, quantum physics sort of vindicates your original idea, though not for the same reasons (nothing to do with numbers). Although space is continuous and infinitely divisible in quantum physics, and any spacial interval can be expressed there without a problem, the theory undermines the idea of the world consisting of sharp-edged objects with definite sizes. And more generally, it suggests that one does not have to be a realist about familiar, "classical" properties of things like position and momentum. Things at quantum scale aren't necessarily what they are at our everyday human scale. And that is an idea worth considering, even if you are not a reductionist, or if you are holding out for a future "bottom-scale" theory that would replace quantum physics.

Thanks for your input SophistiCat. I do understand the importance of using a standard unit to obtain consistent measurements — MikeL

No, you don't understand. The point is not about making consistent measurements, the point is about how we make any measurements.

Your idea is that we measure one thing, then we measure another thing, and then we compare the two numbers. But when you measure something, what are you measuring it against? What is an "inch" or a "meter"? They are nothing other than objects that you use as standard measures. When you measure the length of something, you are already comparing one object (what you measure) against another (the measuring instrument, the ruler). So your idea that the only way to relate the sizes of two objects is to measure each of them separately and compare the results is exactly backwards. We compare objects already as part of any measurement. That is what it means to measure something: it means to directly compare the same property, such as length, in two different things, one of which serves as the standard measure.

Now of course we can't measure anything exactly. And measuring something as exactly pi units, as suggested, is no easier than measuring something as exactly 1 unit: either way, there are a number of factors that will limit the accuracy and precision of your measurement, so that it can never be exactly x units, whatever x is and whatever the units are (unless you take the object itself as your standard measure - in which case you do have the exact measurement of 1 unit, since every object is identical with itself!) But if you are a realist (at least about spacial dimensions) and believe that things possess sizes independently of our measurements of them, then I don't see why you regard our inability to perform an exact measurement as a confounding ontological issue. And if you a not a realist, then your conclusion that objects don't possess definite sizes follows directly from that, and you don't need to confuse yourself with any "digits."

If space is infinitely divisible, nothing can be measured accurately as there is no accurate measurement to give – the decimals keep rolling. — MikeL

Who is doing the measurement? How? And what for?

When I measure the size of some object, I am comparing its size with the size of some standard ruler. But that means that there is an object whose size is not measured - it is taken as a standard unit for all other measurements. So there is at least one object in the world - the chosen standard ruler - whose size is known exactly: it is exactly 1 standard unit. Any object whose size is also 1 standard unit will have the same size as my standard ruler. And since I can choose anything as my standard ruler, then anything can have the size of exactly 1 standard unit, so those rolling decimals are not an issue (I have no idea what you think the problem is with decimals, anyway).

In practice, of course, the more precise length measurements are made using less direct methods, but ultimately the measurement comes down to the same principle: we compare something against another thing that we take as the standard unit of measurement.

The bottom line is that in order to make a measurement, we compare one thing against another - which is exactly what you conclude is impossible, because we cannot measure anything (according to you, because of the decimals :s). So you've got it exactly backwards: We measure by comparing things to each other, not the other way around.

Here is a forum that would better suit your purposes:

http://www.thescienceforum.com/personal-theories-alternative-ideas/

Your posts here are off-topic.

From 19th century onwards, our civilization's concept of science is full of technological connotations. However, before the 19th century at least, we know that there was a different scene. Scientific disciplines are under the umberella of philosophy. — Pacem

I think technology is a red herring here. What changed in the course of the scientific revolution is a specialization of scientific epistemology. You can still consider science as "natural philosophy," but it isn't just any kind of philosophy directed towards the natural world. In the past "natural philosophy" could mean "thinking really hard" (in the words of Mike Alder), developing some intricate metaphysics, delving into numerology, or Biblical exegesis. Science nowadays primarily relies on empirical epistemology. That is not to say that empiricism is unique to science, or that non-empirical considerations play no role in science, but the overwhelming emphasis on empiricism is what sets science apart from the rest of philosophy.

That and the social structures and procedures that have crystallized over the last several centuries and have become uniquely associated with science.

I think so. But I don't think this accounts for whether Bayesian approaches to AI and the mind are correct or not. In my view AI questions about Bayesian methods are 'does this statistical model learn in the same way humans do?' or 'is this statistical model something like what a conscious mind would do?', but epistemic questions are 'does this interpretation of probability make sense of how probability is used?' and 'does (list of properties of Bayesian inference) give a good normative account of how we ought to reason?'. — fdrake

Well, if Bayesian probability is supposed to model our reasoning, then there is an obvious connection between Bayesian models and AI, if the idea is for AI to emulate human reasoning.

But does Bayesian probability describe reasoning or prescribe reasoning? It seems to want to do both.

The thrust of the comments is that contemporary statistics uses plenty of methods and mathematical objects that are not consistent with contemporary philosophy of statistics' accounts of evidential content and the methods and objects used to analyse it. One response would be 'so much the worse for statistics', but I think it's so much the worse for philosophy of statistics since these methods observably work. — fdrake

If philosophers are not current with their subject, I would say so much the worse for philosophers. I can only hope that things aren't quite as bad as you say.

I think whether Bayesian models of the mind or of learning in general are accurate in principle is mostly orthogonal to interpretations of probability. Would be worth another thread though. — fdrake

Well, isn't the entire thrust of the Bayesian (aka epistemic) interpretation to psychologize probability?

I read a few things on likelihoodism and other ideas of what is the 'right way' to show that data favours a hypothesis against a (set of) competing hypothesis. — fdrake

I am sorry, my statistics and hypothesis testing background is too basic and rusty to fully appreciate your comments. I didn't mean to advocate likelyhoodism though - I only mentioned it as an example of Bayesians not being satisfied with prior probabilities and seeking ways to avoid them while still preserving what they think are Bayesianism's advantages.

In my view, if there is a conflict of the intuition with something that is already unambiguously formalised, go with the formalisation. — fdrake

While Bayesianism may be an inadequate model of human cognition in every respect, or even in most respects, it may still be a passable approximation on the whole, and a good local approximation, in an asymptotic sense. AFAIK Bayesian models have shown some promise in cognitive sceince and neuroscience, and of course they have been widely used in machine learning - although the latter cannot be considered as strong evidence in its favor, since there's still a lot of debate as to weather neural network AI approaches are on the right track.

I don't have anything on hand, and I cited Sober and Fitelson (his onetime student I think) from memory. But if you google likelihoodism you'll readily find some texts.

Yes, priors, their choice and justification are a vexed issue for Bayesianism, so much so that some would rather not deal with them at all (e.g. "likelihoodism" of Fitelson and Sober), or at least eschew ignorance priors (e.g. Norton). But to Bayesianism's credit, it at least makes the issue explicit, whereas frequentism kind of sweeps it under the rug.

Good point about psychology as well. Orthodox Bayesianism is usually justified by Dutch book arguments or similar, which presuppose some highly idealized rationally calculating agent. It is often said that people's intuition is crap at dealing with probabilities. This sentiment, no doubt, sets that kind of rational probability as the standard for comparison. But wasn't the very idea of "subjective" probability to take our psychological intuitions as the primary source of probability valuations? There seem to be conflicting agendas here. But on the other hand, if we give up the simplistic rationalism of Bayes, won't we then diverge from scientific (not to mention mathematical) probability, carving out a special theory that's only relevant to psychology?

There's also a very good introduction to interpretations of probability in the SEP article Interpretations of Probability. (Though probably biased towards Bayesianism, the author's preference.)

I think that practical differences between frequentism and Bayesianism are overstated. With careful analysis one method can usually be translated into the other.