I think Chomsky avers (somewhere on youtube) that Hume and Heraclitus were privy to the same insight. Of course he draws a different lesson from it than Quine. But he doesn't say the doctrine itself is mistaken, or even that it is behaviouristic. And it isn't. It points out that you can't objectively ground reference in behaviour. — bongo fury

To that, one might want to add a long list philosophers who have rejected epistemological foundationalism on the basis of either phenomenological or causal arguments, for inscrutability is a simple corollary of holism and uncertainty.

Whenever an engineer measures the 'false positive' rate of a prediction rule, it is always in relation to a definition of ground-truth, that varies from experiment to experiment. For example, in a face-recognition machine-learning problem the definition of 'ground truth' is the particular image dataset used to train the classifier algorithm. But there cannot be an all-encompassing data-set for defining what a face image is across every face recognition problem, because every situation has different and conflicting auxiliary premises, such as what counts as a 'disguised' or occluded face.

I don't think Quine meant to imply anything more than that.

Any absolute or all encompassing notion of inscrutability is self-inconsistent,something that Quine was presumably aware of. We can only understand the notion of inscrutability on a case specific basis when translating terms of one language into terms of another language. For example, we can understand the inscrutability of 'Gavagai' terms belonging to a native speaker's language relative to our own linguistic practices including our use of the word rabbit. Likewise, we can understand the inscrutability of 'rabbit' references in our own language relative to our understanding of potential scientific experiments in behavioural linguistics. None of these uncontroversial senses of inscrutability add up to a grand philosophical thesis.

↪TheMadFool No, because to say that something is 'subjective' is to say something about its composition.

Pain is subjective because it is made of states of a subject.

Pain cannot be true or false. Truth and falsity are properties of propositions.

The proposition "Mike is in pain" is true if Mike is in the subjective state constitutive of pain, false if he is not.

So, subjective and objective are terms that I am using to refer to something's composition.

Truth and falsity are properties of propositions. — Bartricks

What makes you think that subjectivity/objectivity isn't also a property of propositions?

Let us suppose that society never spoke of abstract pain, and that it instead invented a unique "pain designation" term for each and every person, that applied only to that particular person. E.g, "Bartrick-ouch", "MadFool-ouch" etc. In such a community, would it make sense to classify utterances of "Bartrick-ouch" as being subjective/objective ?

Recall that we use public criteria for determining whether a verbal report is subjective or objective. In the case of "abstract pain" applied to a particular individual, we use more than the behavioural response of an individual for determining whether "abstract pain" is an appropriate designation of their situation; for the meaning of "abstract pain" is in relation to the average behavioural response of the average individual with respect to the average situation.

Yet in the case of "Bartrick-ouch", we cannot, by definition, compare your behavioural responses to other peoples. As far as we are concerned, if you yell "Bartrick-ouch!", that can only mean bartrick-ouch.

"The observer is the observed", as with a Metaphysical assertion, shouldn't be interpreted as being a report or proposition. Rather, these sorts of statements are better understood to be meta-cognitive speech-acts to re-conceive one's idea of self and world.

An inherent characteristic of meta-cognitive speech-acts is their circular justification, which makes them appear viciously circular and possibly self-refuting when analysed logically. But arguably this is as much true for our ordinary conceptual schemata as it is for mystical or otherwise alternative conceptual schema.

In my opinion, it isn't logically possible for Buddhists to enter into metaphysical arguments. If a closed-minded critic claims that Buddhist expressions of thought portray to him something false or meaningless, then the critic is expressing something that is undeniable; namely the inexorable effect that Buddhist expressions of thought have upon him. Given that Buddhism is a pragmatic philosophy, with the cognitive dimension of it's practice concerning therapeutic acts of thought, the current 'language-game' that the critic disputes is by definition unsuitable for him. He is invariably the best person to know what alternative language-game he is better suited to playing.

The biblical meaning of "Good and Evil" as in 'The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil' can be interpreted to mean everything that exists, rather than it referring specifically to moral categories. In which case the parable of the Garden of Eden is a natural metaphor for expressing the epistemological stance of pragmatism that rejects the representational idea that knowledge is a mirror of nature, and that ontologically prioritises immanent experience over theoretical constructs that are intellectually derived from such experience.

No. 1 expresses the limitless discursive activity of rational analysis, which can sometimes be represented compactly via an infinite loop like in No. 2, except where iterative deduction leads to intermediate conclusions that are not-identical to their premises.

Yet the ultimate inability of rational analysis to defend any given proposition doesn't mean the proposition is false, with Zeno's paradox being the paradigmatic example. For we cannot give a logical proof of motion, and yet we still 'know' of motion because we are nevertheless able to literally construct it; this is a vivid demonstration of why knowledge cannot be represented solely in terms of axioms, and why any account of knowledge must distinguish the activity of practical synthesis from the activity of discursive analysis.

Nevertheless, one way to study such paradoxes is by way of epistemic logic, in which some axioms directly represent beliefs or knowledge, while other axioms represent higher-order beliefs or knowledge such as 'one's knowledge of one's own knowledge' , 'one's beliefs about one's own knowledge', 'one's beliefs about one's own beliefs' etc. etc.


By the way, circular reasoning where the conclusion is considered to be identical to the premise, and hence where no deduction has actually taken place, is characteristic of normative speech acts like "Tidy your room!" whose justification in response to a child's scepticism might consist of the reply "Because I said so!". In my opinion, Metaphysics from the perspective of cognitive psychology, is the study of a particular class of self-reinforcing speech-acts that influence language, motivation and perception.

Wittgenstein briefly entertained a somewhat similar idea in the blue book, when he said "apparently it didn't occur to Socrates to enumerate everything we call 'knowledge' ", as part of an argument for empiricism.

However, to think of knowledge in terms of axioms is misleading, because

i) we can only write down a finite number of axioms, even though our knowledge production faculties can produce an indefinite number of axioms, without an a priori knowable upper-bound.

ii) Knowledge equally consists in the use of axioms and their creation; yet these processes cannot be specified as additional axioms, because we then enter an infinite regress (see Quine's 'Truth by Convention' and Lewis Carroll's Paradox).

iii) we do not always know what we know; furthermore our belief states are invariably inconsistent.

Therefore it is misleading to think of knowledge as an axiomatic system.

As an aside, the IEP says

" here it is important to remember that, in addition to cause and effect, the mind naturally associates ideas via resemblance and contiguity. Hume does not hold that, having never seen a game of billiards before, we cannot know what the effect of the collision will be. Rather, we can use resemblance, for instance, to infer an analogous case from our past experiences of transferred momentum, deflection, and so forth. We are still relying on previous impressions to predict the effect and therefore do not violate the Copy Principle. We simply use resemblance to form an analogous prediction. And we can charitably make such resemblances as broad as we want. Thus, objections like: Under a Humean account, the toddler who burned his hand would not fear the flame after only one such occurrence because he has not experienced a constant conjunction, are unfair to Hume, as the toddler would have had thousands of experiences of the principle that like causes like, and could thus employ resemblance to reach the conclusion to fear the flame. "

https://www.iep.utm.edu/hume-cau/

I am not a Hume expert, i'm just a googler. But doesn't this defence of Hume miss the point, or at least fail to stress the epistemological target of Hume's argument?

Assuming Hume was a rational and non-superficial thinker, he would have granted the possibility that we can "infer" causal relationships even without appeal to resemblance. For example, when a baby is first born, it might initially behave instinctively to avoid fire, implying that it already has a concept of causation.

Surely, any behaviour, especially avoidance behaviour, can be interpreted as embodying a causal understanding of the world, even when the behaviour is without precedent and there are no earlier resemblances to draw upon.

The dispute I'm raising here, concerns conflicting interpretations of 'having' knowledge. On a behavioural interpretation of knowledge, the fire-avoiding baby might be said to "already know" that fire hurts. Yet on a mentalistic, verbal or otherwise representational interpretation of knowledge, the fire-avoiding baby is completely ignorant of fire hurting, even when it instinctively acts to avoid fire.

So assuming Hume was a good philosopher, his concepts of resemblance and constant-conjunction must have been mental concepts referring to the mentalistic interpretation of knowledge, where they make sense. For instance, in our modern world of virtual reality it might be the case that we instinctively avoid virtual fire as we might also instinctively avoid virtual spiders and virtual snakes, even though we consciously appreciate, via resemblence and constant-conjunction, that these virtual entities are likely to be harmless.

To my way of thinking, subjective idealism isn't a hypothesis about nature but merely a grammatical reminder that we employ empirical criteria in our understanding of each and every concept - even including our representational concepts concerning 'presently unperceived' real objects.

The subjective idealist isn't denying the conclusions of causality, for he isn't denying the intelligibility or epistemological significance of counterfactuals. He is merely insisting that abstract objects and causality are intelligible and even undeniable precisely because they are semantically reducible to actual experiments and to thought experiments whose sense in both cases hinge upon mental and sensory experience, even if definitions of physical concepts in terms of particular sensations are impossible to give.

The idea that a thought experiment or actual experiment can disprove subjective idealism, is therefore an oxymoron as far as the subjective idealist is concerned.

To what extent do the objectives of neuroscience overlap with the objectives of transcendental
phenomenology?

In my opinion, if we are talking about a purely naturalised conception of neuroscience whose only objective is the description of the stimulus-response mappings of the brain of a third-person, then these objectives have nothing in common.

Wittgenstein in the Blue Book, briefly raises the tantalising idea of a solipsistic "first person" neuroscience in which the experimental neuroscientist and the test-subject are one and the same - for example by placing an electrode into your own scalp by using a mirror, whilst recording your thoughts and observations.


In my opinion, "Solpsistic neuroscience" cannot be expected to produce results that are commensurable or even consistent with standard naturalised neuroscience. I don't however, see how naturalised neuroscience can claim epistemological superiority, for that would be question-begging according to the transcendental phenomenologist.

That for a certain broad class of systems with certain qualities the consistency of same cannot be proved within the system is demonstrated as a consequence of Godel's theorem's. But you do not appear to be acknowledging that the proofs in question are meta-mathematical. — tim wood

Well any demonstration of axiomatic incompleteness is a purely syntactical demonstration, in spite of any semantic or meta-logical pretenses to the contrary. It purely consists in the exhibition of a well-formed formula f and it's negation ~f , in a circumstance where neither is currently known to be syntactically inconsistent in relation to a given set of axioms.

The fact that it is possible to prove the relative consistency of PA in relation to the relative consistency of another system, is again, an equally syntactical derivation, whilst the syntactical notion of absolute inconsistency is also potentially observable by deriving f & ~f. But i don't understand the notion called absolute consistency. For that seems akin to the idea of 'completed infinity'; both of these notions are impossible to determine, or even to define in a non-circular fashion, and only serve to disguise the under-determined semantics of logic that is actually decided a posteriori when a sentence is actually derived, proved, or else used in a fashion unrelated to logic.

No it isn't. I'm thinking you've read the proof and worked through it at least some - but maybe not. The universal quantifiers are then qualified via recursion schema. . — tim wood

I was referring to the cause of incompleteness, which is due to unbounded universal quantification in cases where universal quantifiers cannot be eliminated. Although here I made a mistake, in that the origin of incompleteness in weaker systems than Peano Arithmetic lies with the universal quantifiers in the other arithmetic axioms, as opposed to the axiom of induction - as evidenced by the incompleteness of Robinson arithmetic that does not possess the induction axiom. None of this changes anything of significance tho..

And significantly, while your Prov("X," "S") is recursive, according to Godel, Godel also says the related Provable ("S"); that is, "S is a provable theorem," is not recursive. — tim wood

And hence the reason why the universal quantifier over ~Prov('S','G') to form ~prov('G') should not be interpreted as literally "passing over"every number, which was my original point. For Prov('G') might still be derivable, even though Prov('S','G') isn't actually derivable for any 'S', if PA turns out to be omega inconsistent. Likewise, ~Prov('G') cannot express the fact that Prov('S','G') is not derivable for some 'S', for then the diagonalisation lemma yields the contradiction t => ~Prov(''t') for some t.

The sentence t => ~Prov("t") has an infinitely expandable fractal-like structure due to the sentence being fed it's own godel number, and there is no known reduction of it's quantifiers to those of the axioms. Therefore, whether or not PA is consistent, we don't have a semantically interpretable sentence. All we have is a syntactically verifiable self-negating sentence that has no meaningful interpretation.

The ultimate mistake is this: In logic, the absence of a witness should not be equivocated with the witnessing of an absence. Only by making this conflation, as is done in classical logic, can Godel's sentence assume its controversial and illogical interpretation as proving it's non-provability.

It is disingenuous sophistry of textbooks to suggest that t => ~Prov("t") has the high-level interpretation "t implies that t doesn't have a proof", even with the consistency disclaimers. Worse, it disguises the synthetic a posteriori nature of reasoning.

An existential quantifier cannot make a non-trivial existential claim. Either the quantifier concerned is analytically reducible to an instance of the axioms, else the quantifier is logically meaningless and should not even be informally interpreted.

So it appears to me, so far, that you're the guy that says "prove it" to the respective proofs until they're driven into their own grounding in axioms and sense, at which level the call for proof is an error. Are you that guy?

That is, I do not take you to be challenging or disqualifying Godel, but rather making some assumptions both counter-to and beyond it, for other purposes. As you say above, — tim wood

On the contrary, I'm about eliminating unprovable assumptions from popular understandings of logic.

The Wittgensteinian intuition regarding the identity sign, roughly put, and defended here by MU, is that it is the meta-logical expression of synonymy, which upon full analysis of the expression concerned, is eliminated to yield substitution operations among 'non equal' logical terms, each denoting distinguishable objects. This point of view has been shown to be as expressive and as consistent as the logical interpretation of identity, even if on occasion standard theorems of mathematics need amending.

Not quite. Not "For all Godel numbers p," but instead, for all x, x being any natural number. Some xs will be ps, most not. Them that aren't won't be (encode) a proof, and them that are also won't be a proof. — tim wood

Sorry, that was actually a typo. Nevertheless this exchange perhaps serves as a useful reminder that any number represents a legitimate theorem relative to the provability-predicate of some Godel-numbering system.

Furthermore, for any provability predicate Prov('X','S') interpreted as saying 'X' encodes a proof of 'S', it isn't actually knowable which numbers represent legitimate proofs, due the possibility that Peano-arthmetic is inconsistent and proves absurdity, together with Godel's second incompleteness theorem which forbids the possibility of PA representing it's own consistency. Neither humans nor God can ever claim knowledge of PA's consistency, for all we can have are proofs of consistency relative to the consistency of other systems, which begs the question.

Of course, it is standard practice to explicitly state consistency as an assumption when we informally interpret PA and discussing incompleteness, so your remark is valid, after a bit of clarification. My political agenda here is actually concerned with how to interpret PA without assuming consistency, in light of Godel's results. For there are arguably many conceptual benefits to be had by dropping the consistency assumption, that demonstrate the fundamentally empirically contigent, vague and indeterminate nature of logic and mathematics that is better understood as being a posteriori in nature.

Incompleteness is the result of unlimited universal quantification in Peano's axiom of induction, that takes us from the non-controversial constructive semantics of quantifier-free Primitive Recursive Arithmetic that represents the predictably terminating algorithms, to the controversial non-constructive interpretations of PA that represents every possible algorithm. Logic should therefore replace the simplistic sign of universal quantification for a richer collection of signs that distinguishes the different use-cases of the original sign, whilst also making explicit the relation of the Axiom of choice to universal quantification. David Hilbert in fact did use a system closer to this, called the epsilon-calculus during his attempts to prove consistency, and it is in fact making a come back.

And the universal quantifier is both part of the proof, and proved separately within the proof. — tim wood

Consider universal quantification over the negative-provability predicate in PA, that is informally interpreted as saying " For every 'S', 'S' doesn't prove 'G' ".

We know for a fact that this has no syntactical expression in PA, since if PA is consistent then the statement isn't decidable (via the Diagonalization lemma) and if PA is inconsistent then PA is unsound and has no interpretation whatsoever. We also know that for any particular 'S' and 'G', PA can decide whether or not 'S' derives 'G'.

Therefore the universal quantifier above cannot have the ordinary meaning of every, which ought to have been the central conclusion of Godel's incompleteness theorem. In stark contrast to the commonly accepted idea that Godels' sentence is self-referential with definite meaning.

So we have two choices. Either we stick to our a priori philosophical concepts and abandon mathematical logic and it's physical embodiment as being an unsuitable language for expressing and justifying philosophical truth. Or we revise our philosophical intuitions to match what PA and its physical embodiment can and cannot express. I'm saying the latter.

I read this as your taking exception to the use of existential (i.e., existential and universal) quantifiers unless it/they "abbreviate an independent proof of the fact concerned...". So, if I say x>3 is true for all x greater than three, this is neither true nor valid, subject to a proof of the "for all"? — tim wood

This is acceptable, because the contradiction it expresses can be represented without universal quantifiers. It is analogous to having a function that by design terminates, and that converts an arbitrary number into a number or another arbitrary number. the conflation of all with arbitrary is perhaps the central source of controversy and misunderstanding in logic.

If "the present" refers to the specific context in which it is used,i.e. it is an indexical, referring to different things on each and every occasion that it is uttered, then to speak of the present as 'changing', is merely to point out that we can remember using the words "the present" differently. The idea of a "changing present" might be eliminated if we instead uttered unique indexicals in place of it on each and every occasion.

On the other hand, whereas we ordinarily speak of the "the present itself as changing", as if "the present" was a rigid designator, for some reason we tend to merely think that our knowledge and remembrances of an immutable past has changed, which indicates that we tend think of "the past" as partly an indexical in relation to our present state of knowledge and remembrance, and partly a rigid-designator referring to an immutable and transcendental temporal object.

Now the main point of contention here, as i see it, is whether or not the concept of the past deflates to our interaction with "present" appearances, including memories. If it does, then we can eliminate "the past" in the sense of an immutable entity that transcends phenomena, and as with 'the 'changing present', we would merely be grammatically wrong to speak of the "the past" as changing.

↪simeI have to refer you to the proof itself. It relies on recursion and ω-consistency. I quote this: "Every ω-consistent system is obviously also consistent. However, as will be shown later, the converse does not hold." (The Undecidable, Ed. Martin Davis, 1965, p. 24).

PA may be inconsistent, but I take Godel's qualifications on his system P, of which he says, "P is essentially the system which one obtains by building the logic of PM around Peano's axioms.." (10), & ff., as sufficient to regard his claims as rigorous. As he observes later (p. 36), "In particular, the consistency of P is unprovable in P, assuming P is consistent (in the contrary case, of course, every statement is provable).

should not be informally interpreted as saying "n is not a proof of S for n < ω".
.... and this should not feel in the least bit troubling or surprising , for there is no formal justification to support the heuristic and informal interpretation of universal-quantifiers as denoting each and every member of an infinite domain , unless that is to say, the universal quantifier in question was constructed using the axiom of induction.
— sime

Agreed. Informal remarks about his proof are often not quite right. But I think it's pretty clear that the axiom of induction or something like is a main piece of his proof. — tim wood

Peano's axiom of induction isn't an axiom of logic, and plays no part in standard proofs of Godel's incompleteness theorem. It can however be shown to be responsible for causing incompleteness, in the presence of the other axioms of peano arithmetic.

The reason this matters, is because in logic the use of an existential quantifier should not be informally interpreted as bearing witness to a fact, unless the quantifier is used to abbreviate an independent proof of the fact concerned that does not beg the use of this quantifier in a circular fashion.

For otherwise we might just as well say that "a universal quantifier has proved a universal truth, because the universal quantifier says so".

The universal quantifier in "Godel's sentence" G which supposedly says "For all Godel numbers p, p does not encode a proof of Godel sentence G", isn't an abbreviation of an independent proof of G's non-provability. Therefore this quantifier should not be given this common (mis)interpretation.

Certainly there are similarities between the 'seven deadly sins' and symptoms of mental illness. Was the early christian concept of 'sin' more pragmatic than the modern christian concept?

Because a large percentage of NDEs and pre-death or death-bed visions are interactions with the deceased. Therefore, one can conclude based not only on this, but given all the other points that have been made, that we are much more than simply this body (the brain, etc). — Sam26

I don't follow. All that exists are verbal reports and their proximal neurological correlates that are roughly clustered, as is expected by the shared structure of human brains that learn and interact within a shared culture.

These observations tend to reinforce the scientific usefulness of the Cartesian perspective, that mental states should be considered local, discrete and internal to each and every human brain.

Certainly there are drawbacks and oversights of the standard Cartesian view, but I don't seem them as being intimately connected to the phenomena of NDEs.

There is much to be said regarding interactionist conceptions of personal-identity that are holistic and non-reducible to particular events or entities, and yet I still fail to see the relevance of NDEs in relation to the question of mortality, even if NDEs violated our existing understanding of causal relations by producing verifiable paranormal results:

For according to standard type-physicalism, NDEs are by definition types of mental events that correspond to types of biological functioning and so NDEs cannot imply anything transcendent of biological functioning, even if paranormal claims were verifiable.

Conversely, if one's conceptualization of personal identity is sufficiently fuzzy , then immortality is assured by definition, even if NDEs fail to produce verifiable paranormal results.

Whatever a person's beliefs are regarding subjective continuity, I cannot see how those beliefs can be challenged or supported by evidence. For any belief concerning the relationship of the physical world to consciousness isn't an empirical hypothesis, but a definition of 'consciousness'.

" {|||||,|||||||} 'equals' {||||||||||||} " isn't visually acceptable to me. The left side looks too short.

In certain contexts, we might treat the expressions 5+7 and 12 identically, as for example when discussing what our shared formal convention says concerning our customs of numeric substitution. Yet in mathematics applications, these expressions cannot be treated the same, as simply demonstrated by children who must sum with their fingers.

It is wrong to insist that our mathematical convention grounds the meaning and truth of mathematics in application. For instance, it is incorrect to claim that "the conventions of logic a priori determine that 5+7=12, whereas the physical calculation merely confirms it".

Consider, for example the addition of two summands that are so large that their summation cannot be precisely determined in any individual physical experiment, let alone by hand. Here there isn't a clear distinction between the truth of the summation according to convention, versus the confirmation of the summation bu physical demonstration.

And in visual psychology, it should not be regarded as an error if a test subject reports that he saw 5+7 as 13. It simply means that visual phenomena are not a good model of ordinary arithmetic and vice versa.

Sure it is: 1 is not a proof, 2 is not a proof,..., n+1 is not a proof,... The limitation is against going on into the transfinite. I'm not looking at the moment - subject to correction - but I think the relevant qualification is call ω-consistency (omega-consistency) — tim wood

It is precisely because Peano arithmetic might be ω-inconsistent that Godel's constructed sentence should not be informally interpreted as saying "n is not a proof of S for n < ω".

.... and this should not feel in the least bit troubling or surprising , for there is no formal justification to support the heuristic and informal interpretation of universal-quantifiers as denoting each and every member of an infinite domain , unless that is to say, the universal quantifier in question was constructed using the axiom of induction.

"If I take this anesthetic, then I will lose consciousness."

When said by a third party, this is an empirically verifiable and empirically contingent proposition - for the loss of consciousness in a third party has a behavioral definition.

But what about in my own case when I take the drug? Here, I do not have a behavioral definition for loss of my own consciousness. All i can have in this case, is a wakeful sense of amnesia in relation to memories I have of previously ingesting the anesthetic.

Here, to refer to my sense of amnesia as being equivalent to an earlier loss of my own consciousness would be a tautology.

In another example, there is the canonical witness for Gödel's first incompleteness theorem:


S = "S is not provable in T"


It is a witness for the theorem that says that there exist expressions in the language of first-order logic that are not provable from any possible choice of axioms (phrased in the same language).

S happens to be formally not provable from T. Well, that is what S says. So, in a sense, S is even logically true. — alcontali

Certainly, if S is such that S implies ~S, then an axiomatic derivation of S entails inconsistency. And Godel exhibited an arithmetical proposition of this form. But here, S should not be formally interpreted as a referring to its lack of provability. For this heuristic interpretation of S is terribly misleading, because the universal quantifier in S that supposedly ranges over the godel numbers of every proof, isn't obtained by mathematical induction. Therefore it's interpretation as referring to every proof isn't justified.

The senses in which 1+1=2 is said to be an analytic sentence or tautology, are not the same as the senses in which 1+1=2 is said to be an empirically contingent proposition.

What estimating feels like.

Well, I suppose if one can't coherently suggest that something might be wrong or mistaken. I'm not sure what that could be. You say 'logically speaking', but even the laws of logic can't be assumed against the commonsense argument. — Paralogism

Formality makes no difference here. The soundness of an argument refers to external validation.

What are permissible criteria for either defining or testing a mistake in the reasoning process?

Logically speaking, mustn't such criteria be considered as being at least partially-independent of the reasoning process, as for example when we consult a calculator?

So if you acknowledge the possibility that your reasoning could be mistaken, then haven't you already begged the existence of at least a partially independent world ?

It seems to me that no matter how bad or stupid a politician or idea is, the BBC can be trusted to normalize and promote it in the name of journalistic objectivity.

Assume I've given all the relevant information, for the sake of discussion. — bert1

sure, - of course my point is to say that it is impossible to given an exhaustive account of all the potentially relevant information that necessitates an action; the consequence being that free-will and determinism cannot be absolute polarities but are terms used for the relative comparison of two or more specific situations.

In the scenario, I am very hungry and want one of the cakes. I have a choice whether to eat a cake or not (according to street). The deliberation involves feelings of hunger and desire (nothing else). I eat one of the cakes. Not eating one of the cakes in this circumstance would involve other factors which I have not given (i.e. madness, cream allergy, diabetes, obesity, hallucination etc). My choice to eat one of the cakes is highly determined.

However I really don't mind at all which cake I eat. I make a choice and eat the jam doughnut. The question is, is this decision determined or not? I don't think it is. I think it is a free arbitrary choice. Is this even possible do you think? It's logically possible. Is it metaphysically possible? Physically possible? Psychologically possible? Or is there always a determinant? — bert1

At least according to the compatibilist logic of Hume, a 'free willed' action must at least be superficially describable as being 'caused' by one's will; the charge of determinism being avoided, by understanding the concept of necessity as referring to states of psychological compulsion as opposed to causal relations per se that merely comprise of an inferential attitude in relation to a previously observed conjunction of events.

Another source of compatibilism, as i'm trying to point out, lies in the indeterminacy of the very meaning of determinism, as contradictory as that might sound.

Regarding vagueness, indulge me with this idealised scenario, which I grant might be impossible to actually exist. Just as the non-existence of perfect circles does not stop us calculating using assumptions of perfect circles when designing machines, I want to contrast the concepts of free and determined choice by using an idealised scenario. — bert1

Isn't the concept of the perfect circle also relative to the situation? 3.14159 being a 'more' perfect description than 3.141 regarding the circumference of the circle on my monitor?

Analogously, is there a notion of perfect determination that applies in every case?

From my perspective, by linguistic convention I should at least say that "you have a choice as to what you eat" with respect to the imprecise situation you put forward.

But is what I am saying a claim about yourself, or is what I am saying a mere figure of speech that linguistic convention dictates to be a permissible description of the imprecise observable situation that you put forward?

Supposing you now reveal that you have an allergy for cream. Then i might now say "it appears that you don't have that much of a choice relative to my previous understanding, given your newly admitted allergy for cream"

The question is, does there exist an absolutely precise and exhaustively describable circumstance that you can describe, or that I can observe, under which I am at least permitted to say without fear of controversy, that you have absolutely no choice but to take one of the presented options?

And whatever I am permitted to say here, would this now be a claim about yourself, or again would it be merely a figure of speech in relation to the imprecisely defined concepts 'exhaustive' and 'absolute'?

Compare your question to other borderline questions that are in relation to vague concepts:

Is this adolescent an adult?
Are these grains of sand a heap?

Let's say I have a choice between having a chocolate eclair and a jam doughnut and I don't mind which. However I somehow manage to choose one. Is my choice determined or free? — bert1

Ordinarily, freedom refers to an availability of alternative courses of action, in relation to a partial specification of the influences bearing upon a decision making process.

Conversely, determination refers to a causal or logical relation within a partially specified context.

These concepts are therefore compatible, in virtue of them being under-determined. Their use in any given situation is analogous to describing a glass of water as being half-full and half-empty.

So basically you are questioning the meaning , ontological status and normative value of counterfactual propositions?

Stated this way, we can hopefully avoid at least some of the circularity and vagueness concerning the meaning of free-will (or determinism).

When asking counterfactual questions like "What if Hitler had won the war?", there are philosophers who regard such questions as referring not to our past, but to either the potential outcomes of potential new experiments here or elsewhere, or to the histories of other potentially existing Earth-like planets whose circumstances are sufficiently identical to ours to be considered suitably analogous to answer such questions.

To me, this interpretation of counterfactuals seems to avoid the main epistemological concern of 'world-intervention' skepticism - that the past could merely be a story in which we play our part. For even if the past is merely a story, counterfactual inferences under the potential outcomes interpretation presumably remain viable, assuming that one isn't also skeptical of induction. For our story might be a-causal, but who is to say that it cannot follow a pattern?

Formally speaking, actual infinity merely refers to the axiom-of-infinity. But this isn't a good answer, because this does not account for the controversial motives for introducing the axiom.

The underlying dilemma is the result of different interpretations of the informal sign "..." used to denote partially elicited sets, and how these different interpretations lead to different conclusions concerning the very meaning of a set, including what sort of sets are admissible in mathematics.

Ordinarily, in statements such as {0,1,2,3,...}, the sign "..." is used to state that the "set" refers to a rule (as in this case, the rule of adding one and starting from zero), as opposed to an actually completed and existent body of entities. This is synonymous with potential infinity, that appeals to one's temporal intuitions regarding a process whose state is incremented over time.

In other cases such as "my shopping list is {Chicken,wine,orange juice,...} ", the dots might denote either

i) an abbreviation for a particular, finitely describable list that is already existent, but only partially described on paper

or

ii) An indication that a list is abstract and only partially specified, that the reader is invited to actualize for himself via substituting his own items, or rule of extension.

or

iii) a mystical sign, referring to "actual infinity" in a sense that is empirically meaningless, physically useless and logically a mere piece of syntax, but which nevertheless has psychological value in causing giddy vertigo-like sensations in true-believers when they contemplate the unfathomable.

Unfortunately, because "..." is informal notation with at least three completely distinct operational uses in addition to having private psychological uses, people continue to conflate all of these uses of the dots, causing widespread bewilderment, philosophical speculation and moral panic up to the present day.

The definition:

n>1: n! = n * (n-1)!
n=1: n! = 1

is indeed somehow circular, but that is the essence of recursion. It works absolutely fine. Wittgenstein does not seem to handle that. — alcontali

Wittgenstein is rather attacking the heuristic semantic notion of "self reference" in relation to the iterative evaluation of a sequence of expressions via recursive substitution. Unless the iteration eventually halts, the resulting sequence isn't even sentence, never mind a proposition. Yet if the iteration is halted, each resulting sub-expression has non-equivalent arguments.

No, I think it is clearly not consistent. But the distinction between past and future is obviously "the present" — Metaphysician Undercover

From SEP
"
McTaggart distinguished two ways of ordering events or positions in time. First, they might be ordered by the relation of earlier than. This ordering gives us a series, which McTaggart calls the B-series. A second ordering is imposed by designating some moment within the B-series as the present moment. This second ordering gives us a series that McTaggart calls the A-series. According to McTaggart, in order for time to be real both series must exist,although McTaggart holds that, in some sense, the A-series is more fundamental than the B-series."

Yet aren't "the past", "the future", "the present" etc, indexicals that refer to different things on each occasion?

Supposing that each of us always carried a mobile phone and that we agreed to eliminate "the present", "now", " currently" etc. from public discourse by replacing each of their uses with the exact current reading of the International Atomic Time supplemented with the Gregorian calendar. Likewise, we respectively do the same for "the past" and "the future" by replacing their use with time-intervals that are before or after the exact current TAI time.

Doesn't this elimination of temporal indexicals also eliminate all talk of change, and therefore reduce MacTaggart's A series to his B series?

I would be interested in knowing more about Ayer's rejection of memory as a means of distinguishing between past and future. Could you elaborate, or cite a reference?

It seems to me that experience (which happens in the present) is more than capable of distinguishing between before and after (e.g., cause and effect), and designating the measurable change: time (per Aristotle). — Galuchat

I'm not particularly knowledgeable about Ayer's particular ontological views regarding the relationship between memory, phenomena and time, and I am certain that Ayer, like all of us, had no problem acknowledging the practical role that memory serves as (unreliable) testimony to the truth of past-contingent propositions- i'm only referring to his general acknowledgement that the doctrines of logical positivism and verificationism failed -see for instance his interview with Bryan Magee. We still do not possess a theory spelling out what we mean by meaning, evidence and truth, especially in relation to past-contingent propositions for which there cannot exist direct observation or immediate testimony:


Is it logically consistent to be an empiricist who accepts a hard ontological distinction between past and future?

Is the semantic distinction between the past and future somehow reducible to appearances or to relations between appearances, or to potential appearances as a function of potential experiments?

How should physics and computer science categorize "future-directed" behavior in humans and other agents?

How can this be reconciled with the causal theory of reference which identifies the meaning of an utterance with it's causes?

the philosophically enlightening thing about the craft of software engineering is it's cut-throat pragmatism that makes explicit what mathematics and logic are really about, such that the disease of philosophical speculation cannot take hold. There aren't any software engineers debating whether an infinite loop really runs forever, unlike a significant proportion of set-theorists, who as a result of refusing to get their hands dirty in practical application, end up associating mathematical infinity with the religious idea of eternity.

It is certainly true, that from a pure meaning-as-use perspective the distinction between the past and the future is much harder to distinguish than it is from an axiomatic meaning-as-reference perspective (which effectively insists upon an a-priori and axiomatic past-future distinction).

We also anticipate both the future (e.g is this oasis I see a mirage?), as well as the past (e.g. will my current archaeological dig verify the massacre that allegedly took place here in 1942?). Of course in hindsight, yesteryear's predictions that supposedly refer to today are now seen retrospectively as mere instances of retro-futurism that in actuality only ever referred to what occurred when yesteryears so-called "prediction" was made ( how can yesterday's predictions even be wrong?)

We cannot definition-ally distinguish past-contingent propositions from future-contingent propositions on the basis of experiential content, unless we are prepared to bite the bullet and call a certain appearance "the past", such as the contents of a memory or photograph. But once we reject this as a mistake, as did Ayer, we realize we are then unable to provide an experiential distinction between past and future, even while we continue to insist on it.

There is of course, a big difference between an eaten Hamburger and a Hamburger sitting in front of us; if an object is called 'destroyed', then there does not exist a direct and local reference to the object that we can point at. There is instead a potentially infinite and interlinked fabric of facts called "the evidence of the destroyed object" together with our investigatory sense of anticipation. Hence an empiricist might be able to equate the past with our current sense of inferential expectation together with today's appearances taken holistically as an inseparably entangled whole. But this of course is too vague to constitute an empirical "theory" of any description.

Nevertheless, at least we can still speak of our expectations as being fulfilled, as for instance when walking up a hill to inspect the view, or when digging in the earth for relics. We can also partially order our historical knowledge in such a way as to minimize the statistical dependence of the occurrence of so-called "earlier" events on the occurrence of so-called "later" events. Perhaps it is possible to go neo-Kantian and argue that today's perceptual judgments necessitate an axiomatic past-future distinction in order to speak of "types" of objects and events. I don't know about this though.

In my view, a metaphysical assertion is meta-cognitive speech-act whose intention is to influence perception, behavior and values, via a wholesale change of view. A Metaphysical debate is the result of differing views or values being simultaneously incompatible, typically with one party being unable to grasp the sense or value of the other party's viewpoint.

I see metaphysical assertions as value-apt, but not truth-apt in a representational sense. After all, to a certain extent what is at stake is the method of representation, which in turn is decided according to what it is considered to be worth representing.