My understanding is that as lying perverts communication, a deontologist cannot, ever, lie, to be consistent. — AmadeusD

Deontology merely means a rules-based ethical system. The word itself does not imply a specific set of rules. A ruleset which included "Above everything else, do not lie", would be flawed. Kant, for instance, was more sophisticated than to include such things in his deontology.

Yes. To lie would be to disrespect yourself to a degree that is unacceptable to a deontologist (is my understanding) — AmadeusD

Someone who values their own self-perceived "respect" so much that would condemn an innocent to a terrible death for its sake, operates under a deeply flawed moral system, I think most would agree.

What characterizes the mindset associated with honesty? — YiRu Li

I would say there is not one universal "honest mindset". People are honest for various reasons:

* A sense of moral obligation to be honest
* A sense of dignity in being honest
* A fear of the consequence of being caught in a lie
* A desire to connect genuinely with the other person
* A pragmatic desire to forgo maintaining a web of lies

And so on. Each might have a characteristic mindset. I don't know if there is a unifying state of mind that unites them all.

Is 'honest' a noun or a verb? — YiRu Li

I always thought the tendency to nounify something which seems more of an attribute, and adjective/adverb, was a little strange. Due to this nounifying tendency of English, honesty becomes something you can "have" or "not have", an object you carry around with you, and may lose one day. Due to this linguistic quirk, one may wonder, what is the "essence" of this honesty? What is it made of?

Can one still be deemed an honest person if they occasionally engage in deception? — YiRu Li

Honesty, like most things in life, is not a black and white quality. One may be more or less honest. Even if you occasionally lie, you may still be considered basically honest. I would suspect that there might be something mentally wrong with a person who literally never lied.

Welcome, YiRu!

Stupidity is just poor functioning, compared to a perceived norm, of one or several components of the voluntary portion of the central nervous system.

The best definition I have heard is someone doing the exact same thing in identical circumstances and expecting a different outcome.

This is why human stupidity has its benefits. Sometimes something different does happen. — I like sushi

This is the worst definition (though commonly, this formulation supposedly defines insanity), followed by the reason why it is the worst definition.

:up:

Can you give an example that comports with what humans envisage morality to be viz. contemplated outcomes resulting in a judgement informing the decision to act with regard to other sentient beings? — AmadeusD

This is a "philosophical" account of morality whose connection to lived reality is dubious at best. For a more reasonable approach see here

. I would say that to ask Israelis to behave like "civilized" westerners is about as sensible as asking why you personally aren't white. — tim wood

What a monumentally inept analogy, it doesn't begin to make any sense.


Israel's special and exclusive history of grievance gives it special and exclusive license to behave as it likes. And how dare you suggest they should behave in a more civilized manner. Yes yes, we're heard it before.

A

When it comes to a different people, e.g. Amalek, large scale destruction is on the table. — BitconnectCarlos

As sanctioned by whom? God? Or have you given yourselves license to do the sanctioning as well?

Yoni Saadon, one of the witnesses, recounts in the Times: "I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her. She was screaming, 'Stop it - already I'm going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me!' When they finished they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head. I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too. I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologise to her, saying 'I'm sorry.'" — BitconnectCarlos

How many such tragedies has Israel perpetrated in turn?

If moral judgments could be traced back to biological aspects of our species, then, prima facie, that would count as a moral realist position. I just don’t think they can: I think it is entirely possible that I should resist my biologically wiring. — Bob Ross

In fact, animals also exhibit moral behavior. Isn't the most natural explanation that it is instinctive?

Wouldn't it be incredibly odd if a highly cooperative species like ours *didn't* evolve instinctive sentiments that reinforce cooperation and discourage anti cooperative behaviour? If instead, all this was left to the uncertain vagaries of cultural transmission?

Look at the earliest moral claim of many (all?) children:

"It's not fair!"

In other words, "I have been treated unjustly". Are parents going around teaching their kids what is justice and how to identify injustice? I think not.

I think it is entirely possible that I should resist my biologically wiring. — Bob Ross

You have a forebrain capable of overriding most any impulse. What of it?

...and now do you not see that the context is important? — Banno

Yes, that was my point

If a moral realist were to demonstrate that there was a moral fact which was analogous to the above proposition, such that I just needed to understand the context of the words (within the language) being used (e.g., ‘pawn’) and it would be true that (1) it is factual and (2) true; then I would accept it. My problem is that I don’t think there are any moral facts, period. — Bob Ross

"One cannot move pawns backwards"

Is true within the context of the social practice of chess. Moreover, it is the social practice of chess that makes it true; without this practice, the truth of it loses its foundation.

So you are granting that if there was a moral statement true in, and because of, its social context, then this statement is a moral fact?

Some of the people here hold Israel to an impossibly high standard, — RogueAI

What kind of sick joke makes restraint from massacring helpless and innocent civilians, leveling their city, while talking like genocidal maniacs, an "impossibly high standard"?

Even by the crudest biblical eye for an eye standard, Israel has taken seven or eight.

It comes to mind that the unannounced objective could to make Gaza unlivable and then try to push the 2,2 million or so to Sinai. Perhaps for a 'temporary time', so it wouldn't be an act of genocide / ethnic cleansing. — ssu

:up:
This seems clear to me.

You might have chosen a better example. — Banno

Haha, I did have a queasy feeling about it.

"One cannot transmute lead into gold using chemistry."

Do you believe in social realities? I can guarantee you behave as if you do. After all, nation, money, property, family, company, are all social realities, and it would be a difficult life indeed that didn't acknowledge any of them. So even if morality were "only" a social reality, that would still perhaps be a more formidable reality than you are giving it credit for.

And what if morality had a biological origin? Unlike say money, which is purely a social construct (yet can literally move mountains), what if morality is rooted in an elemental, biologically predisposed notion of justice (as it is, imho)? If so, would it count as "real"?

Ultimately I think the whole "is it real" question is just too vague. You have to specify what kind of "real" you are looking for. If you are talking about physically real (as the question tends to implicitly, and unjustifiably, slide towards), then no, of course morality isn't real. But then, there are more things in heaven and Earth, physicalist, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Even if we take natural language philosophy seriously, there is a nuance of natural language that seems to be missing in your analysis: Statements can be "objectively" true in one context, but false when that context is absent.

"One cannot move pawns backwards."

Is "objectively" true, but only in the context of playing a game of chess. Once that context is removed, it is objectively false: after all, I can move the piece backwards just as easily as any other direction. But note that the form of the sentence is no different than:

"One cannot transmute lead into gold."

Which is not dependent in its truth on any particular context.

So the question is, are the truths of moral statements context dependent or context independent? To satisfy a moral arealist such as @Bob Ross I think they must be context independent. But either way, the form in which the statements are posed cannot tell you that.

This example doesn't work. The "ought" isn't derived from the is, it is an implicit part of the statement itself.

To me love is the identification of the self in the other. In true, reciprocal love, a kind of shared, communal creature is born, not existing solely in either participant.

"You complete me", says the lover. The lover identifies the loved as an integral part of themselves, without which they are only a partial being. When away from the loved, the lover thinks of them constantly, feeling around for them like for a lost appendage.

Losing a lover is a special, terrible kind of pain, for a part of oneself literally dies. It is an acute neural injury that may take months or years to heal, as the dense connections constituting the loved in the lover atrophy and are pruned away.

But there does also seem to be grounds for dismissing this as mere illusion. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Especially since it is explicable why such an illusion might arise and persist.

Personhood is embedded in language, with such words as "I", "you", "person", "self", and special words which single each of us out individually. Since we largely think in language, personhood is imbued in our thinking.

We are discrete physical bodies in the world, with narrative histories built upon memories.

Sensory data is translated (somehow) to the phenomenal arena of perceptions, where a central brain area operates processes in those terms. Moreover, the phenomenological reality of this central brain area is divided into external and internal realms, the latter consisting of feelings, bodily sensations, and thoughts (typically expressed as internal sounds and images). This schism between inside and outside sensations is the division between self and world.

All this powerfully contributes to the notion that the self is somehow ontologically fundamental. Yet, experience brain injury or indulge in various intoxicants and you will see first hand how fragile this sense of self really is.

Hey Javi!

Thanks for pointing out the definition, actually. I'm a computer guy, and I've always presumed the computing definition was the predominant one:

proceeding to a solution by trial and error or by rules that are only loosely defined.

Which captures what I was trying to say. Communication is hard!

According to heuristics, I learn by experience. — javi2541997

Don't take it too seriously. Of course we learn by experience, but "heurisitics" is not some sweeping philosophical claim that everything can only be known by experience. We have innate capabilities, feelings, and perhaps identifications as well.


BTW, the next writing contest is opening up soon, keep an eye out! Hope to see you there.

There is only one solution: the acknowledgement that personal Identity is a concept, a heuristic, not an objective feature of reality.

Or isn't it perfect? Because the question can also go ad infinitum: "What do you mean by "What is meant by mean?" :smile: — Alkis Piskas

This is easily dismissed. The question is no different than any other. What is meant by
"poodle"? What do you mean by "what is meant by poodle"? Each iteration means something different, and each is more... meaningless.

You got yourself a perfect circularity! :smile: — Alkis Piskas

This might seem to be a problem. After all, to even formulate the question, you apparently already have to know the answer. Yet, we all know what meaning means... implicitly. If we didn't, we wouldn't be able to use the word correctly. The task here is to make this implicit understanding explicit. To do this, we must make use of this implicit understanding to guide us.

What do you think of Meno's paradox?:

"If you know what you're looking for, inquiry is unnecessary. If you don't know what you're looking for, inquiry is impossible. Therefore, inquiry is either unnecessary or impossible." — frank

This one seems trivial. There are two senses of "knowing what you are looking for", which you might label the "question" sense and "answer" sense.

Question: Where are my car keys?
Answer: In the drawer.

Both of these can be referred to as "knowing what you are looking for", but of course they mean totally different things. To begin an inquiry, you need to know what you are looking for, but only in the question sense. And knowing the question obviously doesn't make the answer irrelevant.

Sorry for the late reply. If you are still interested:

I don't want to deny that the kind of holistic analysis you suggest is wrong, or can't be done, or isn't valuable. But it is also possible, and valuable, to exclude this sort of discussion. It really depends on context, on what you are trying to achieve. When we play the role of philosopher, we are biased towards attempting grand, holistic perspectives. But you won't often find people doing actual work, as opposed to philosophizing, taking this tack. This is not because they are philosophically naive, though they may indeed be. But more importantly, it is useful to exclude as much as possible from a discussion, to focus on what is relevant to the topic. Books on chess playing might include some background tidbits on the history of the game, and even maybe how we process the game neurally. But the bulk of the book will be about strategy, tactics, and analyzing past games: that is, on the consequences of the rules, on their own terms, independent of their history or instantiation in brains.

the rules still change around the margins such that international bodies have just given up on codifying a "one true rules of chess." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is this true? I thought the rules of chess were well established. I think the last major rules change was the introduction of en passant, and this was centuries ago. But regardless, games are axiomatic things, whether or not the rules are universal. Even if you are playing by "made up" rules, i.e. let queens also move like knights, these rules are axiomatic as far as the game we are now playing is concerned.

To say games are axiomatic is to say their rules are arbitrary, having no relationship with anything physical, which is to say that they are informational. This does *not* say that they are sui generis, incapable of being analyzed in terms of other things: they have histories, and like all informational systems, they must be instantiated physically, in order not to be abstractions. But their histories are histories of axiomatic systems.

And yet a small stroke will leave a person babbling incoherently and not realizing that they are doing so, or unable to understand spoken language, or unable to name or understand the function of the objects they see. If meaning in "languages own terms," ignores the fact that understanding and communicating meaning are profoundly shaped by relatively small brain areas then it seems to be missing something quite essential. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Just as a friend circuit might leave an AI language model unable to speak intelligibly. It is characteristic of information that it is dependent on physical instantiation, and yet independent on it, in that the instantiation can take any number of incommensurate forms. This dependence/independence suggests that it is intelligible to speak of informational systems both in terms of its instantiation, and independently of them.

Another point: when you are asking what a word means (as opposed to asking "what language means", whatever that means), this precludes grander, holistic explanations. 7 year-olds happily use the word "meaning", knowing nothing of neurology, information theory, and so on, not even implicitly. If you ask a 7 year old what "meaning" means, they might say, "what something means!". Yet they, like we, must have implicit knowledge of this meaning, in order to use the word properly. The puzzle here is rooting that out.

Not sure what you mean here, but evidence suggest that language isn't understood on a word-by-word basis. You can mess around with phonemes or letter ordering quite a bit and people still understand the meaning of the sentence, and they rely on body language and tone quite a bit as well. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What I mean is, from a neurological perspective correlation seems apt only when considering the meaning of symbols, such as words. As you say, meaning becomes a more complex operation with sentences, where a number of inputs, words, tone, gestures, context, are synthesized. Moving up the complexity ladder, the meaning of say, a story, the construction of meaning becomes a complex, creative synthesis, far from merely correlative.

That's why "eternal relations," are, IMO, simply abstractions. We can abstract mathematics away from its context in the world, tweak rules, etc. but that never makes our thoughts not causally grounded in the correlation based communications studied by neuroscientists. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would be the last person to doubt that, or to speak about "eternal relations" when discussing a language. The signs and rules of a language are utterly contingent, and in fact transform drastically over historical time.

Language, like all social realities, are grounded in thought. But this doesn't mean that language, or any social reality, is not a reality, and is not properly discussed on its own terms.

An easy case is games. Games are obviously human, contingent things, No one would confuse them for platonic, eternal forms. Yet still, in chess, in the game's own terms, bishops move on diagonals axiomatically, not a mere matter of correlation. While, you might aptly describe the mental operation associating bishop and diagonal movement as correlation.

In my op, what I was looking for was the conceptual basis of the word "meaning", in terms of the language. Even neurally, correlation seems to fit best with the meaning of words. The comprehension of sentences seems like a more complex operation. But in language's own terms, its neural instantiation doesn't seem totally relevant.

False statements have meaning. — Amity

Moreover, not every statement is true or false. Commands are the obvious example. Opinions, "coffee tastes good", another. But I think statements of perspective, which is a lot of what we do here, are not binary true/false either. Can you actually assign T or F to every sentence, paragraph, and post here? I don't think so. Our little contributions are more or less consonant with what is discussed, fit well or poorly with the thread of discussion, and are likely true in some senses, false in others. This kind of ambiguity is typical of actual communication, rather than toy sentences such as "the sky is blue"; it is those that are the exception.

And then, of course, it is not merely sentences that have meaning.

If an arbitrary phoneme can be a sign, then why can't an action or a life? Photographers capture actions and use them as signs or even symbols. Biographers capture lives and help people see these lives as signs of one thing or another. But people always do this same thing even without photographs or biographies. For example, the life of Martin Luther King Jr. is a sign of hope and progress in the realm of racial discrimination, and it had already taken on this signification long before a biography was written. — Leontiskos

MLK's life had meaning to people. But to call a life a "sign" takes too much license with the word. From Merriam-Webster:

a fundamental linguistic unit that designates an object or relation or has a purely syntactic function

Signs are just one thing that can have meaning.

There surely is a distinction to be had, but the word "meaning" is clearly used for both of them. — Leontiskos

Now that I think about it, the distinction is clear. "Meaningful/Meaningless" is a word about the sign/representation. It designates whether and how much corresponding meaning the sign/representation has. Whereas "Meaning" is about the other side of the equation, what the sign/representation points to, the meaning.

Perhaps, it's time to ask what prompted hypericin to ask the questions in the OP? — Amity

It was prompted by another thread: there is no meaning of life

There are a few common and contradictory kinds of responses to this sort of question.

• The meaning of life is something fixed and definite, i.e. procreation, God's will
• It is up to you to invest your life with meaning
• The question itself has no meaning

Meaning is a property of things which must be properly apprehended; meaning is fluid and abundant, an exuberant exudation of human life; meaning is elusive, and more often than not, illusory. So, which is it? What does meaning... mean?

Meaning seems to be of great import to philosophers; the whole enterprise can be thought of as a search for meaning. Conversely, it always seems to threaten to collapse into meaninglessness, mere assemblages of words. We've all encountered this, here, and from "real" philosophers. As I attempt to write philosophically, I'm always haunted by the doubt, what does all this even mean?

There is a philosophical tradition (which I am not totally unsympathetic to) which "answers" questions by consigning them to meaninglessness. It's convenient enough, for all these seeming imponderable questions to be mere misuse of language. We can move on with our life. But what does it mean for these questions, seemingly so full of meaning, to be in fact meaningless? Can this even be, if meaning is in my head?

What gets to have meaning, and what doesn't? What are the rules? What is this "meaning" we are so worked up about?

This acknowledges different interpretations (even translations) of text.
But why would 'any old meaning' not do? — Amity

I was trying to show that meaning is more or less fluid or rigid, depending on where it is found. Stories are an intermediate case. Clearly they admit to multiple interpretations. But not any interpretation. Little Red Riding Hood is not a parable about the dangerous and deceptive nature of the over-hirsute; to most, this is a misreading.

I feel correlation is close, but it is missing something.

Clearly correlation itself is not enough. The word "peanut" correlates with the word "butter", and smoking correlates with heart disease, but these are not their meanings.

On the other hand, "correlation" seems to understate what is going on with meaning. For instance, does "3 + 3" correlate with 6, in the same way that smoke correlates with a fire? It doesn't seem so. Rather, the expression is axiomatically endowed with the meaning, "the sum of 3 and 3", because "3" is endowed with the meaning "three units", and "+" with "the sum of what is to the left and right". Just as a computer opcode ADD more than correlates with an addition, in some sense it *is* addition.

Outside the contexts which endow these meanings, the symbols are nothing. "3 + 3" is just a scribble in a culture where it is not recognized, ADD is just a number outside the computer. Inside them, the meaning seems absolute.

Although you made this caveat, in the context, "my life has no meaning", the complaint not that one's life doesn't correlate with anything.

However, I do think there is a general principle that unites them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What about this? Meaning is just the counterpart to representation. "+" is the representation of an addition operation, which is +'s meaning.

Representation has meaning according to a context, which can be physical (smoke/fire), social (money/value, "carrot"/edible orange root), or personal (orange/nostalgia, life/purpose). But the core concept of meaning is agnostic to these possibilities, it applies to all of them.

For any X, one can X, "what does X mean". This means, "treat this X as a representation. What is X's corresponding meaning?". This may or may not have an unambiguous answer, or it may have no answer at all: X is just meaningless.

One thing I think is crucial is that the meaning must in some way surpass the representation. The paradigmatic case of this is signs: signs themselves are nothing. "+" is just two marks intersecting, all the juice is in the meaning, the addition. But all meaning, I think, surpasses its representation.

But aren't looks, actions, poems, and lives all signs? — Leontiskos

A look and poem, I suppose so, yes.

An action? Unless it is an act of communication, it wouldn't seem so. The same for a life, I don't see how a human life can be treated as a sign.

The point I was making is that conveyance or "meaning relationships" does not exhaust the meaning of meaning, and we know this because some signs convey more meaningful things than other signs. For example, a wedding ring is much more meaningful than a crumb on the floor, even though they are both signs which signify a reality. — Leontiskos

This is a good point. Now I wonder if in fact there are two distinct meanings of meaning: sense, and significance. Or, is significance conveyed with "meaningful", a distinct word from "meaning"?

And that's why I say human life doesn't have meaning. It isn't a referent for something else. — GRWelsh

The problem is that people use the word otherwise. Quite a lot of incompetent language users, if you are right. So for instance, is Victor Frankl's "Man's Search For Meaning" just incompetent?

The meaning is invariably in the human being. The meaning of a word, for example, is only constant at the point of a speaker or listener, her body, and never in the signs and mediums. — NOS4A2

How do you account for something like a stop sign? If a foreigner asks you what it means, and you say, it is a spiritual recommendation to stop, meditate, and appreciate the immediate surroundings, you are quite objectively wrong.

Signs convey meaning, but not all meaning is conveyed by signs... Meaning is more than being signified — Leontiskos

I agree, a look, and action, a poem, a life may contain meaning, not just signs. I am arguing that meaning is to that which conveys it as the signified is to signs. Sign-signified is one form of the meaning relationship.

"Meaning" seems to be a rather root or simple concept, not easily explicable in terms of other concepts. — Leontiskos

Then how did we learn it?

I guess you will find some answers: Meaning — javi2541997

Thanks! looks interesting.

signs and signifiers are arbitrary, and meaning is not fixed but constructed within specific cultural and historical contexts. — Tom Storm

I think it is complicated. A word can be thought of as arbitrary, yet "uzuzzxu" cannot be an English word, while "hamlick" could have been; there are rules. There is no essential connection between word and meaning. Yet once established a word is fairly fixed, though drift happens. Words are not chosen at random, they meet the needs of the physical and cultural environments they find themselves in; "arbitrary" is too strong.

Although some might take the view that every variation of meaning is merely the interplay of signs and signifiers. — Tom Storm

I think it is something like this. Not signs and signifiers themselves, but the relationship between signs and signifiers:

X points to Y, but Y does not point to X. X is subordinate to Y, Y is essential, X is contingent.

Where this relationship obtains, you have meaning. And you can ask of anything, what is a/the Y to this X?

It’s sort of a question of whether the state should involve itself in the moral life of citizens. — kudos

Except, we have both been arguing, convincingly I believe, that it is not a moral issue, prohibition has no moral basis.

That being said, does the state have any duty to guide citizens into a life of satisfaction, fulfilment, and happiness... — kudos

Whether or not the state does, prohibition is punitive, and hardly guides its victims to "a life of satisfaction, fulfilment, and happiness". Quite the opposite, lives have been ruined. If the state were as benevolent here as you presume, it would be oriented towards treatment rather than punishment.

I mean, how many drug users do you know whom you would call satisfied and fulfilled individuals (… be honest)? — kudos

I divide drugs into a spectrum between "pleasure" and "insight". Abusing pleasure drugs (i.e. opiates, dopaminergic stimulants, alcohol) can clearly trash a life. Whereas you will find many users of insight drugs (psychedelics being the purest example) reporting increased life satisfaction. These days I just smoke weed, which favors the insight side of the spectrum. My life has its ups and downs, but overall weed has had a positive impact.

Prohibition is merely the most extreme example of regulation. — LuckyR

So what is your point? I am against the extreme regulation of drugs. But there must be at least some regulation, as your pilot example shows (although weakly, as it seems at least as much a regulation of pilots as drugs).

I do not argue against regulation, but rather prohibition.

There are some who take comfort in normal behaviour, but honestly isn't this point a little old fashioned now? You can do pretty much anything nowadays and get away with it more or less. — kudos

I think this is somewhat true now, but not true when attitudes against drug users hardened.

What about my other points?

I think there are several reasons:

There is a general contempt for drug users, especially among the upper class, in part because primarily the lower class is drawn to them. This contempt finds expression in punitive laws.

There is a fear of neuro-atypicals, especially among conservatives, who demand and take comfort in conformity. Drugs mechanically induce atypical thoughts and behavior, which must seem fearful to the conservative mindset.

Kids are especially intrigued by drugs, and prone to abuse them if they get the chance. This provides a fertile ground for moral panic, for the dirty chemicals and their users defiling their pure children.

There is the well known fact that the war on drugs was consciously formulated to punish Nixon's leftist enemies. This war was exported by the US to the rest of the world, and other autocrats have taken note and emulated it.

There is the institutional corruption surrounding drug prohibition, where local governments and other actors profit from its harsh enforcement.

There may even be an element of harm reduction, though this is likely the weakest reason, especially as drug prohibition is well known to fail at this, and it doesn't apply at all to psychedelics and weed.

Therefore,
(The form of meaning is X means Y) to hypercin. — unenlightened

You misread, I said that this was the mistake OP was making.

The form, in general, is that X means Y to Z.

but I suspect that when you say 'life', you are speaking personally, such that your formula is:– niki wonoto means "nothing" to @niki wonoto. — unenlightened

I would suggest that his formula is "@niki wonoto means nothing", and that the form of meaning is X means Y. The delusion that meaning, if it is to be meaningful at all, must lie latent in the thing itself, the X instead of the Z.

But I think your post captures another delusion, that meaning of your life comes from others, not yourself. Sure, you can devote your life to others, even others devoted to you. But your meaning is not contingent on others. This is the social butterfly's view on life, who surrounds themselves with as many friends as possible. Do social butterflies live especially meaningful lives? This has not been my impression.