How?

Let's say a law exists that says the legal owner of my car is my cat. Another law exists which says that the legal responsibility for anything the cat does with that car lies with me, and that I have a legal right to control that car in whatever way I think promotes the cat's best interests.

What prevents this? Because if you think something does, you'll need to take down the whole law around legal trusts.

You're confusing ownership with responsibilty.

We're supposed to (in ordinary situations) infer that the speaker believes his assertions, and so an assertion from which we infer contradictory beliefs doesn't make sense (in the casual sense of the phrase). — Michael

What else could 'infer' possibly mean other than 'form a belief that...'?

So why are we 'inferring' from listening to speech acts, but not 'inferring' from other perceptions? You seem to want my perception of water hitting the roof to be some kind of direct transfer of world-fact into my brain, yet speech acts are inferred. I can't see why you'd make such a distinction.

We do different things with morals than with language — Dawnstorm

No, we do different things with some of our desires than we do with language. Calling those desires 'moral's is a linguistic event. It's you talking to me at the moment, It's a social interaction and so it has to involve only social meanings for us to be able to communicate.

Yeah, how do I know? Maybe I'm just not hungry enough to eat a banana. But there is a constellation, and the ways to arrange the pieses are, to an extent similar, and extended observation can get you a clearer picture. I don't think purely moral actions exist, and I also think completely amoral actions are rare. So the question is most likely "how do I know the ratio?" — Dawnstorm

I agree with you here once the definitions are sorted out, but I was actually asking about the definition in the first place. You gave the example of someone who's actions do not chime with modern society's moral, but whom you accept is "following their own moral compass". what I was asking was how you knew then that it was a 'moral' compass he was following. He's clearly following some objectives, why have you attached the term 'moral' to them? IF you're not going to use the public definition of what sort of objectives are 'moral' ones, then why use the word at all? What differentiates 'moral' objectives from just any old objective?

The answer for me is that society has labelled certain types of objective 'moral' ones, just like it's labelled certain wavelengths of light 'blue'. We don't get to just choose our own wavelengths to call 'blue', We don't get to just choose our own objectives to call 'moral'.

So where do you place protests, criticism, and conflict, if the moral realm is all public sanction? Don't forget that every single one of us is part of each other's context, even if only in some very minuscle way. How do topics (like, say, trans rights) enter the public discourse? I can't imagine explaining any of that without morally interested agents. (Meme theory maybe?) — Dawnstorm

I'm not quite sure what you're asking here, but I'll have a go at answering it.

The term 'blue' is a publicly defined term, we learn what things are 'blue' as we grow up by using the word more or less successfully. No amount of learning can tell us where 'purple' becomes 'blue' or where 'blue' becomes 'turquoise'. This is because those parameters were never set. There's no right answer. Society's fluid use of the term is what determines it's meaning (that it the truth-maker, or arbiter of it), and society's fluid use of the term hasn't given a judgement on the matter, so there is no right answer.

Which types of objective (or characteristic, or behaviour) are 'moral' ones is determined by society's fluid use of the term in communication. No amount of learning can tell us where ambiguous or disputed objectives become 'moral'. This is because the parameters were never set in that much detail. Some people call abortion 'moral', some call it 'immoral'. They all understand one another within their language communities, so both are right. No one calls hitting old ladies 'moral' (at least no fluidly communicating language community does), so hitting old ladies is not 'moral'.

None of this has any bearing whatsoever on what I want to get other people to do or allow me to to do. I am not dictated to by the meaning of the word (nor is anyone else). I might use it's rhetorical power to add persuasiveness to my argument, but that would be nothing but rhetoric. If the entire world got together and told me that what I wanted was called 'flurb', it wouldn't make any difference at all to whether I wanted it.

Easy things first. I'm talking about the distinction between being wrong about language, and being wrong about morals. I can't figure out how to read you and still be able to tell the difference. — Dawnstorm

Ah, OK. Then yes, I'm saying there isn't a difference. In short, morality is a social concept, the language used to describe it is social too and so private meanings make no sense. One can only speak about one's morality using the public definition of what morality is and that definition cannot refer to a private feature otherwise it's not a useful word. Wittgenstein's beetle and all.

a) moral (person acts according to private moral compass) — Dawnstorm

How would they know? As per the private language argument, unless their behaviour is publicly acknowledged to be labelled 'moral' how would they privately maintain a criteria for their behaviour to class as moral and still expect the word to play a meaningful role in communication? How would they distinguish a 'moral' compass, for example, from any other compass, without a public definition of 'moral'?

Say I declare that hitting old ladies is moral. I follow my own moral compass which is to do whatever makes me feel good. How can I now use 'moral' in a conversation? It's taken on an entirely private meaning which might not even be the same meaning I had for it yesterday (I wouldn't know). No one would know what I meant, I would not know what they meant and I couldn't even be sure what my own diary entry meant from yesterday.

I've noticed about myself that I when I say someone acts morally, I mean that the person acts according to an inner moral compass — Dawnstorm

How do you know? I mean how do you know it's a 'moral' compass, and not just any old compass?

I think this is the place where I should lay open my bias. I've studied sociology on university, but the discipline I fell in love with was linguistics. — Dawnstorm

Fair enough. I studied psychology with a research interest in group belief adoption, so that's our biases laid out.

In moral discussions, people tend to chose non-controversial rules, so controversies are going to feel implausible. — Dawnstorm

Yeah, that's actually where I'm going with this. Once we accept that 'moral' is a publicly defined term, we simultaneously accepted the mess and the dynamism (like your definition here, by the way), we have to accepted that one a thing is 'moral', that's alk there is to it. There's 'moral', not 'moral', and 'sort of moral, fuzzy at the edges'. But there's no way if working out that fuzziness, there's nothing most moral, it just us what it us, a messy, community defined group.

This peculiar tough experiment was especially fruitful since it heralded in some measure the movement away from metaphysical or purely descriptive accounts of knowledge and belief and towards more contextual and pragmatist accounts of belief and knowledge avowals and ascriptions. — Pierre-Normand

Yes. Yet fifty-eight years later the effects are here somewhat blunt.

I think we agree 'bad' doesn't mean anything on its own beyond a vague indication toward a negative. One can be a bad actor, but a good person. One can be a bad person but a good actor. So bad and good only mean anything relative to some objective or ideal. Something which is morally bad is bad relative to ideals of morality (behaviour, character...). If I've understood you correctly, we're on the same page here.

The word 'moral' has to have some public meaning for it to be useful. It has to identify some publicly available set of behaviours or ideals IR characteristics, otherwise it would serve no purpose and be impossible to learn how to use. So I don't see how it can mean 'whatever behaviours you think fit'. That would be a private meaning.

You might want the public meaning to be something more than just an arbitrary set of behaviours, maybe publicly available membership criteria such that our violent student could make an argument that his behaviour fits the definition. But, as I said to @SophistiCat, it seems highly unlikely to me that the meaning would be so pure, given the language's history, but even it was, it would still have to have boundaries in order to be a useful word at all.

So we're left with the public meaning of 'moral' being a messy cocktail of ideals, religion, culture, psychology etc, but overall being exclusive in some way that is publicly agreed on, otherwise it's useless. We each might want it to mean something else, something more easy to police, but it doesn't and we, as individuals, don't get to just declare what words mean.

Hitting old ladies is far from any of the ideals or standards within the general public definition of moral, so doing so is morally bad.

You're seem to be getting rid of a useful distinction, and I can't figure out why? What do we get in return? — Dawnstorm

Not entirely sure what distinction you mean here.

I'm still not sure why you'd think I allow a private meaning for the term "morally good". — Dawnstorm

Because you said

If you see a foreign language student hitting an old lady, intervene, and he says "I understand that you think it's morally wrong to hit an old lady, but I disagree," we likely do not have language problem. - A moral disagreement — Dawnstorm

In order for the student to merely 'disagree' here, rather than be wrong about the meaning of the term 'morally bad' he must have his own private meaning of the term 'morally bad', one which is in disagreement with the one the rest of the language community uses. If, on the contrary, he does not have a private meaning of the term 'morally bad', then he must acquiesce to the meaning determined by the language community, and that does not include hitting old ladies.

When the grocer delivers potatoes, you 'ought' to pay him because that's the meaning of the work 'ought'. — Isaac


This seems needlessly hard to parse or outright wrong. I don't know which. — Dawnstorm

Hopefully the former, especially as I wrote 'work' where I meant to write 'word' (new phone, different keyboard).

There's far more philosophical debate in arguing if pet animals or wildlife can own something than non-living objects. — ssu

I'd forgotten about the conservative reification of ownership.
No, ownership is itself just a legal status with purely legal implications (none of this 'natural rights' bullshit). It can be legally assigned to a sofa just as well as to a person. All it means is that certain other laws pertaining to the legal state of ownership also attach to that thing where relevant.

If a company owns assets and a CEO has a legal right to assign them, then there's nothing surprising or philosophically problematic about it. It just means (contrary to Friedman's assertions), that the CEO can spend them in pursuit of whatever objective they see fit.

the above makes the counter point to the argument that you and ↪Isaac
uphold that Friedman see's profit making the only reason for corporations — ssu

The issue is, as I said above, Friedman offloading responsibility to shareholders, workers, customers and then assuming all they want is money. The fact that, in some tightly circumscribed situations he deigned to admit they might want something else doesn't counter that point at all. It's the offloading of responsibilty that's the problem, the idea that CEOs can hold their hands up and say "not my problem".

Exactly the same issue would arise in the hospital example. If the CEO completely ignored, say, the environmental damage of his decisions by saying "I'm just pursuing the rendering if certain services, considering anything else would be a dereliction of my duty". It's still a ridiculous excuse.

Well, pieces of paper cannot own anything. — ssu

Why not?

Which itself is the typical narrative based on stereotypes hauled against economists, especially the Chicago school. — ssu

Indeed. But one of us is actually right.

My distinction between the two is based only on the single fact that one has satisfied the required condition for acceptance and the other has not. — Edgy Roy

Indeed. Distinction is one thing. Labeling one half 'belief' and the other 'truth' is an act of definition. We do not get to just define terms to our liking, they already have public meanings (often many). For example, both types of thought might be called 'beliefs'. One simply stronger than the other and additionally earning the label 'truth'.

Any two things are identical in some sense and different in another, so without context it's wrong to say anyone is ignoring the difference, they may merely think it irrelevant to the context.

I tend to draw a less sharp distinction than you do between those beliefs about which I'm prepared to say they're true and the others. For me, my judgement about whether the criteria have been met to call something 'true' is not simple, nor always readily available to my concious awareness.

So I agree with you that "It's raining" and "I believe it's raining" express the same type of thing (a belief about the weather) to different degrees of certainty, but I don't think we can universalise the distinction. That too is something within the mind of the person making the statements.

More likely Friedman is arguing that companies should not be obliged by the government to have other goals — ssu

No he's not. He's arguing that a CEOs job is soley to make as much money for the company's shareholders, customers and workers as they can within the law. His argument is that the company is a legal fiction and so doesn't own the assets it appears on paper to own. He goes on to argue (variously) that these assets belong to the investors (shareholders, workers, customers... anyone which gives the company money). Additionally, he then decides on their behalf that all they're interested in is money (and law).

All of which conservative flag-waiving is aimed only at excusing sociopathic CEOs when they drive workers, the environment and social structures into the ground to increase their bonuses.

3
A Justified True Belief is just a restatement of the condition where sufficient evidence to accept the statement as Truth has been achieved. To continue to refer to it as a belief expresses an unjustified resistance to accept the existent difference. — Edgy Roy

I can go along with your distinction between 'truths' and 'beliefs' as being the degree of justification, but it's a little too far to say that someone not accepting this proposed definition is somehow in denial, don't you think?

It depends what you mean by positivism. I've written quite extensively about model-dependent realism, which (if you take positivism to be naively realist) is in direct opposition to it. If, however, you take positivism to simply be the assertion that there is something unique about the fact that we act as if we share a world of sensory perceptions where we do not with other beliefs, then yes I agree that this special feature makes information gained from sensory perceptions of a completely different kind, such that it is universalisable.

I don't believe in an external 'truth' at all. I do believe in an external world, but it's state is hidden from us as we can only detect it's effects on our senses. So we make inferences about it's state from those. I do think that there being an external world which we share is the best explanation for the similarity and effectiveness of the models we build. There is no such similarity nor effectiveness in models of non-physical beliefs and so no good reason to assume their source is a shared external one. This makes questions about the universal 'truth' of such propositions pointless. We have no reason to believe in an external shared source in the first place, and so we have no good reason to investigate it's state.

I think I have a pretty accurate grasp of your overall view. — Wayfarer

Seems in contrast with...

It surprised me you took such a dim view of Steven Pinker, I thought his 'Enlightenment Now' would be right up your street. — Wayfarer

Perhaps your straw man versions of what you think I think are not quite so robust as you'd like to believe? Perhaps this is...

because you don't understand what I'm talking about. — Wayfarer

Yes, they are. — SophistiCat

Well then who are the experts who determine the status of certain behaviours? In Britain, if there's a dispute over the taxonomic status of a plant, a Cambridge Professor called Clive Stace has the final say. His book 'The New Flora of the British Isles' contains all the definitions, but they're based on (largely) seed structure and chromosome number. So...

we group things for a reason. This isn't an exact science, but neither is defining the boundaries of biological taxa. — SophistiCat

The difference is that the 'reason's for grouping things into the category 'morally good' are varied and inconsistent an historical accident of cultural evolution, religion, politics... Not at all like taxonomy, which may well have it's disputes, but they are over largely agreed upon criteria with established authorities, as the example above.

"Good" and "bad" are natural kinds, to put it crudely. Playing around with labels doesn't change what they are. — SophistiCat

There may well be a certain way in which they are, but given the history of language evolution would you not find it extremely unusual that two such loaded terms as 'Good' and 'Bad' were purely the result of our identification of some Platonic essence and not in the least bit influenced by culture or social dynamics? I certainly would.

And if we accept the above, then how would a person learn how to correctly apply the term 'morally good' only to those things which met the criteria of this Natural Kind? How would we ever know which 'Natural Kind' our community of language users were referring to if their only use of the term is the one loaded with cultural and psychological biases?

Whether I personally fell inclined to pursue what is 'good' and avoid what is 'bad' is entirely another matter. Unless you have a good contrary argument, we already know that we cannot have private meanings for words, so the meaning must be that which the community of language users collectively maintains, it cannot privately mean that which I find to be appealing or repellent. Yet that maintenance is a mash-up of natural kinds, politics, biases etc. it would be impossible to distinguish which part of the definition refers to a natural kind even if we were to accept the existence of such a thing.

This is why I think it's important to distinguish the three aspects of moral-talk.

There's what actually counts as morally 'right' and 'wrong'. This is definitional, it's our social group as language users which define this, we cannot meaningfully say they have it wrong because we cannot have a private meanings for words, it makes no sense.

There's an investigation into why certain behaviours are labelled 'good' and 'bad' by our community of language users (as you say, we don't do so arbitrarily). IT would be incredibly surprising here if the answer we came up with was anything like taxonomy - that despite all the complexity of religion, politics, culture and psychology we somehow ended up with our definitions being a pure reflection of some natural kinds. Nothing in this investigation has any normative force over what the definitions 'ought' to be. There's no reason at all why definitions should be anything other than what they are.

Finally there's your own personal inclinations to act. You may be inclined toward behaviours which are 'bad', or you may be inclined toward those which are 'good'. You may be inclined to reprimand or impose on others for their behaviours. But none of this has any normative force either. Your own private inclinations cannot determine the meaning of socially mediated terms. We cannot have private meanings for words, language is a social game.

My method ... says it's better if those in power pay attention to what actually brings the phenomenal experiences of suffering or enjoyment to people, without bias toward or against anyone, and then say that the things that preserve or create enjoyment while suppressing or eliminating suffering are good, or at least, better than the alternatives. — Pfhorrest

So what? You either have the power to influence them in this way (in which case you are the one in power, not them) or you don't, in which case you're pissing in the wind. I'm merely pointing out the pretending your position is an alternative to authoritarianism is a facade. It's whoever is in in power who gets to control the discourse, gets the loudest voice, gets to influence other people into agreeing with them, gets to say who's too 'irrational' to take part, gets to intimidate, manipulate, bribe, seduce, beguile, tempt, mislead... all until enough people in this 'global debate of your agree with their position to swing the 'accounting' process in their favour.

Your suggestion instead seems to be that it doesn't matter what they say at all; which is tantamount to letting them say whatever they want, tell whoever to do whatever, — Pfhorrest

If I had a choice (ie had the option of not 'letting' them) then I would be the one with power, not them, wouldn't I? That's the meaning of the word 'power' in this context. The ability to control something.

The only people to be excluded from the "let's not give up" conversation are the people who say "let's stop talking about it", either because they insist that they just have the right answer and you have to trust them on it no questions asked, or because they insist that it's impossible for anyone to ever have the right answer.

You seem to be in the latter camp. You think there can't be a right answer, and want everyone else to stop trying to figure out what it is. That just means everyone else gets to ignore you, — Pfhorrest

Exactly. Anyone not with the program is ignored. And you're trying to avoid authoritarianism?

I say some things are actually good or bad -- not just baseless opinions, but things that we can be correct or incorrect about. You, by all lights, seem to vehemently disagree with that. — Pfhorrest

You're equivocating over 'actually'. Things being 'actually' good or bad, and there being a single correct answer to each moral problem are not the same thing. 'Good' and 'Bad' are terms in a shred language, as such there are things which fit them and things which don't. My disagreement is over the cause of those criteria. Your claim is that we can (and should) have a conversation aimed at determining which behaviours fall into which category, assuming there's some external 'right' answer. My position is that those definitions are already largely determined by biology, culture and our upbringing and it's pointless pretending to have a discussion about edge cases because any result will be immediately overridden by the force of biology and cultural movement anyway.

Authoritarianism is a 'bad' thing. It's one of the things that humans don't like, mainly a part of our basic biology, partly the result of the culture we live in, but it's definitely (in extremis) one of the things we call 'bad', so it is 'actually' bad. I'm also inclined to rail against it, probably to an extent greater than would be called 'bad', but that's nothing to do with morality (which is a social term).

if a majority of people disagreed with you that liberty is good and authoritarianism consequently bad, do you think that that would make you definitionally wrong, because all that makes them good or bad is majority of the linguistic community using the words "good" and "bad" to apply to them that way? — Pfhorrest

Yes, of course. How else do you think language works? In the late eighties, if I recall correctly, Michael Jackson coined the term 'bad' to mean things which he (and his culture) approved of. For that time 'bad' was used in this way. everyone within that culture understood what the term meant. If everyone started to refer to authoritarianism as a 'good' thing, then I would just be using language wrong if I referred to it as 'bad'. Whether I was inclined to support it, or fight against it would remain unaffected by it's socially mediated status. We cannot have our own private meanings for words, it's basic Wittgenstein, fairly well accepted these days.

I greatly admire Einstein and frequently refer to him, but I really don’t think he ‘got’ Emmanuel Kant. — Wayfarer

You're dodging @Janus's question. The point was made that enlightenment principles are simply presented as a 'better' way of dealing with the shared assumptions about the external world. It's a better way of engaging in cooperative enterprises by arriving at a kind of 'averaged out', or unbiased perception we can then share and use to build bridges, improve medicine, hopefully reduce wars (over different religious outlooks)...

Every time anything like this is mentioned, you try to paint enlightenment thinkers a dull naive realists who just haven't read enough, when hardly any are actually like that. We're well aware of the role the mind plays in perception, well aware of the role culture and upbringing play in biasing our understanding of the world. We're trying to find 'the least biased' version so we can better cooperate. So your interventions are blunt. You don't present a better alternative, just whine about some straw-man version of the one we have.

So what if the moon is determined by our subjective minds? What are we going to do about that? Try to find the best, most reliable inter-subjective model for it so we can predict tides and produce green-energy from it, or throw our hands up and say "well if it's all subjective we might as well just ask the archbishop to pray for greener energy"?

advocating that those people in power use a particular method isn’t any more authoritarian than literally any other possibility, where no matter what someone is going to enforce something and everyone else ultimately has to deal with it. — Pfhorrest

You set up your method as an alternative to moral 'right's being determined by whomever has the most power. I'm saying that a direct consequence of them having the most power is that they get to do that. If your advocation influences them in any way, then it is you not them who has the most power (you're able to influence them). Ultimately, whomever has the most power is going to determine the terms of social engagement. You've dodged the argument again by just diverting it. The point was that you said certain people were to be excluded from your "let's not give up discussing the issue" approach on the grounds of your judgement about their open-mindedness. I said that was authoritarian, your reply seems to be that people in power are going to be authoritarian anyway so what does it matter. I tend to agree, but it undermines your argument about resolving disagreements. If you're going to exclude from that discussion anyone you deem to be 'closed-minded', or 'irrational', then you get to set the terms of the debate, you can simply exclude anyone who disagrees with you, ensuring that the resultant 'resolution' is exactly what you wanted in the first place. That is authoritarianism.

you have no grounds to object to anything at all; if nothing is actually good or bad, what could possibly be bad about authoritarianism? — Pfhorrest

Who said anything about nothing being actually good or bad. I think loads of things are good and loads of thing are bad, What's bad about authoritarianism is that it denies people a liberty which I think is a good thing to have.

You haven't answered the question though. I wanted to know why you confidently allowed the student to have his own private meaning for the term 'morally good', but you're deeply suspicious if he tries to claim his own private meaning for the term 'hitting'?

What if, next week, he decides that 'morally good' is a type of potato, is he still just in disagreement, or is he now just wrong about what kind of thing 'morally good' refers to? If he's wrong about it referring to a potato, but he's just 'in disagreement' about it referring to hitting old ladies, then where's the line, and why is it there?

We're social creatures. we're completely embedded in a culture, just to talk requires a huge amount of cultural cooperation. Why would we be at all surprised to find social rules entwined with our language?

If you see a foreign language student hitting an old lady, intervene, and he says "I understand that you think it's morally wrong to hit an old lady, but I disagree," we likely do not have language problem. - A moral disagreement — Dawnstorm

So if, in the first example, the student says"I understand that you think it's 'hitting' to push my fist toward an old lady this way, but I disagree," why does no one treat it as a disagreement? It's not, he's just flat out wrong about what hitting is.

the identification of members of the class is not just a matter of learning to use words correctly, surely? — SophistiCat

The class 'good behaviour' has certain membership criteria. That's the same thing as the definition of 'good behaviour'. It's perfect definition is 'everything in that class'.

Natural language terms are not like taxonomic terms. There's no acknowledged authority determining class membership. No one decided what 'game' was going to mean and then everyone else went around finding activities which fit the definition. It's the other way around, we call a loose collection of things 'games' a fit new thing to the category on the basis of how similar they are to the other members.

I don't see why it would be any different with 'morally good' we call a loose collection of behaviours (or characteristics) 'morally good' and then any new behaviours are labelled according to their similarity to existing members.

If I decide the activity of filling in my tax return is a 'game' I've just made a mistake. If I were a new language user you'd correct me, probably by telling me the sorts of things 'games' are. Why would 'morally good' be any different? If I say punching old ladies is 'morally good' I've just made a mistake, that's not similar to the other things in that group.

If a foreign student learning English pointed at someone hitting an old Lady and said "stroking", you'd be inclined to say "no, not 'stroking', that's 'hitting'". If they then said "morally good", why would you not similarly correct them and say "no, 'morally bad'"?

Then the sentence "it is raining" would mean the same thing as the sentence "I believe that it is raining" and both would be true iff I believe that it is raining, and so mistakes are impossible. Are you willing to commit to this conclusion? — Michael

I'm not following you so far as mistakes being impossible. If "it's raining" means the same as "I believe it's raining", a 'mistake' is only possible if other people believe let's not raining or I later come to believe it's not (or wasn't) raining. The actual state of the world is something we can only infer (form beliefs about), so 'mistake' doesn't make any sense there either. We can only dispute or update beliefs.

Why must something be in my mind for me to refer to it? — Michael

You referring to it is a neurological process, some requirements or desire prompts you to form words, the brain searches for the terms to match the referent (in cases like this). It only has concepts in your mind from which to select. It can't select the actual weather, that has no direct neural connection to you language cortices, it can only select from concepts about the weather.

The actual weather causes/updates beliefs which then cause language to be spoken appropriate to them. I can't see any way the actual weather can get through to your language without forming a belief first.

I need to understand the English language to make meaningful use of the phrase "water is H2O" but such a phrase doesn't refer to the English language; it refers to the chemical composition of a certain kind of liquid. — Michael

Maybe, but that's because you have the referrents relating to words in English and also beliefs about water in your mind, you could refer to either. You do not have the actual weather in you mind, only your beliefs about it, so you cannot refer to properties of the weather, only your beliefs about them. When you select the term 'rain' it applies to your concept of rain, not actual rain. If you construct the sentence "it's raining" I can only refer to a belief about a state of affairs because your brain has no other referent from which to select the appropriate terms.

disagreements about moral questions are not similar to disagreements about the meanings of words. — SophistiCat

A moral assertion carries no such ontological commitments, at least not implicitly. — SophistiCat

You seem to have just restated your conclusions, I was more wondering how you got there. No bother if they're just basic bedrocks for you, but if not, I'm interested in the thought processes which lead you there.

With what is 'moral', for example. How does someone who feels differently to the rest of the population about, say, violence, learn what the term 'morally right' refers to? All they're going to see growing up is people using the term to refer to 'good' stuff (being kind to old ladies etc). I don't understand how you imagine they'd ever learn that their preferred behaviour (hitting people) is somehow the same thing in essence that everyone else in their language community is really referring to when they use the term to describes helping old ladies etc.

Just because I might need to believe something about the weather to talk about the weather it doesn't then follow that when I talk about the weather I'm talking about my beliefs. — Michael

It seems to. If you "need to believe something about the weather to talk about the weather", then it certainly seems to follow that you must be talking about those beliefs when talking about the weather. You have no other content in your mind to which to make any reference. Your language has to refer initially to something in your mind otherwise how would your linguistic cortices select the right word?

It might be raining but I might believe that it's not raining. — Michael

It might. But you couldn't talk about it and make any sense. To say "it's raining" requires a referrent for 'raining' to be a property of. To make a claim about the state of a referrent about which you cannot form any form any judgment without it being a belief, and then claim that it differs from a statement about your beliefs, doesn't make any sense.

We can look outside. — Michael

Which would update your beliefs about the weather, you could still be mistaken.

We can talk about things even if we can't know if they're true or not. — Michael

I didn't say we couldn't. I said no sense could be made of it.

The physical state of affairs outside my head. The actual state of the weather. Whether or not water is falling from the clouds, notwithstanding whether or not it's possible for me to know that it is or isn't. — Michael

Right. Which would be a nonsensical referrent.

We're talking about the absurdity, incoherence or nonsensical nature of the sentence "It's raining but I don't believe it's raining". So the question is whether we can make any sense of it (and then, if we can't, why not).

To make analytical sense of it we need first to understand what the terms refer to. "It's raining" appears to refer to the state of the weather, "I believe it's raining" appears to refer to the state of my mind. The two could be in different states with regards to rain and so the sentence seems coherent (if a little odd).

But how can one refer to the state of the actual weather? On does not, nor ever can, know the actual state of the weather, so to refer to it would be absurd (outside of pointing out that it cannot be known). So parsing the sentence as referring to the actual state of the weather makes the sentence absurd.

It's raining if water falls from the clouds. If I'm in some windowless room and so can't see or hear what's happening outside then I might not believe that it's raining even if in fact water is falling from the clouds and my lawn is getting wet. — Michael

To what are you referring with "in fact"?

Are you say it's impossible for it to be raining but for me to believe that it's not raining? — Michael

I'm saying that for it to 'be raining' is someone's belief that it is raining. That's what it means for it to be raining, there is no more to it raining than that some people believe it is raining. So saying It's raining cannot meaningfully refer to anything other than a belief that it's raining. It might refer to it as a theoretical object (say if I was lying, I'd be referring to an imaginary belief that it's raining, one which I'd like you to imagine I actually held), but there's no proper referent for the mere fact that it's raining, that is a hidden variable, we cannot meaningfully refer to it outside of talk like this (about models we use).

Whether or not it's raining has nothing to do with whether or not I believe that it is raining. I can wrongly believe that it's raining or wrongly believe that it's not raining. — Michael

I didn't claim the state of the weather was dependent on anyone's beliefs about it. I said that the state of the weather can only be understood in terms of someone's beliefs about it. The public object "the state of the weather" to which "it's raining" refers is someone's belief about the state of the weather. The actual state of the weather is a hidden variable outside of our Markov blanket.

It's true regarding your belief. It's false regarding the weather. — Michael

This is the issue. How can something be false regarding the weather absent of anyone's beliefs about it. The state of the weather can only be understood in terms of someone's belief about the state of the weather.

Right, well, at least you accept that there is a paradox, unlike several others here. — Luke

Sort of. I actually hold to Ramsey's solution that truth dissolves to the success of beliefs, so I think the paradox has been solved, but I agree there was one.

Edit - I don't want to give the impression here that Ramsey's work was a response in some way to Moore's puzzle. Only that it is a solution to it. I'm unclear on the historical facts, but I'm pretty sure that's not how it actually played out. There's no direct mention of it in Ramsey's writing, to my knowledge.

The review I linked to draws on a large study of fmri data and raises fundamental questions about its accuracy and replicability in many respects. — Wayfarer

I don't understand why you're having such trouble with this concept. Uncertainty in one approach is not a reason to adopt an alternative approach unless it can be shown to be more certain. Do you have an alternative method for understanding mental activity which passes replicability tests?

are the fundamental terms of logic and reason - the structure of syllogisms or logical rules such the law of the excluded middle - a product of neural processes. Or are they principles which it takes a functioning brain to understand? — Wayfarer

I would say obviously the latter. This makes no difference whatsoever to the assessment of which brain areas are responsible for understanding which principles. As such it has no bearing whatsoever on my argument that activity in certain areas of the brain can give us good cause to conclude which of these principles are being used at the time.

The absurdity is in someone asserting ‘P is true but I don’t believe P’. — Luke

Only on the assumption that "P is true" means "I believe that P is true, or I wish to give the impression I believe P is true". That's the origin of the apparent paradox. Correspondence theory would have that "P is true" simply means P, not "I believe that P". If we're to accept this, then there should be no absurdity. There is absurdity, so we must reject this. Wittgenstein, Moore and Ramsey all reject it in different ways, but the point of the paradox is to get us to reject it somehow.

I don’t think it says anything specific about the nature of reason, other than that a healthy brain is required to grasp it. — Wayfarer

It does. It says that a healthy left inferior frontal gyrus is required to grasp that particular bit of it. Which is all I'm saying about using fMRI scans to tell us about how we process moral decisions. Particular parts of the brain are used for particular aspects of reasoning. This is the best, most well-supported theory of how we reach reasoned conclusions.

The corollary of this is that if we see certain brain areas active/inactive during mental activities we can draw a very reasonable conclusion that certain aspects of reasoning are involved/absent.

They [values] might be important nonsense, but they are not sensical. — Isaac


Where ‘sensical’ means....? — Wayfarer

Something about which propositions can be formed.

Edit - I'm not saying I agree with Wittgenstein here. I'm just saying that standard interpretations do not have him saying that ethical values exist or are absolute. In saying their values must lie outside of the world, he's not saying they exist but in some other realm. He's saying they don't exist in the sense that we can talk about.

One cannot believe both simultaneously; that it is raining outside, and that it is not raining outside. — creativesoul

Right. But we're not necessarily talking about simultaneously believing both, not yet.

All with have are two propositions with two different truth-makers. If the truth of "It is raining" is determined by whether it's raining, not by whether I believe it's raining, then I can say it is truthfully raining, but I don't believe it is.

The problem here is caused by the contradiction between a philosophical commitment to correspondence theory, and the actual psychological reality that the truth of a statement is always a judgment and always based on the belief of the person doing the judging.

The drawing of such implications from fMRI studies, especially psychological or ethical implications, is precisely where many major issues of replicability have been found in the ‘replication crisis’. See this review. — Wayfarer

As ever, a lack of certainty in the sciences is not a reason to accept even less certain conclusions from just 'having a bit if a think' about it.

saying that reasoned ethical argument can be isolated or analysed in terms of brain imaging is treating it as if it was. — Wayfarer

How? You've not drawn any rational analogy between the correlation of brain activity with mental activity and pathology. Where's the link?

There is no ‘brain configuration’ that equates to judgement - or rather, if there were, you would have to be using the very faculty which you’re trying to ‘explain’, in order to explain it. — Wayfarer

So. I'm using my faculty to identify the same in someone else. Where's the problem?

For example, people with damage to the left inferior frontal gyrus have trouble with categorical syllogisms. How do you explain this if not via an assumption that this part of the brain is involved in that aspect of reasoning? I, in part, use my functioning left inferior frontal gyrus to reason about the correlation between this subject's brain damage and his inability to do exactly what I'm doing in assessing him.

What you’re wanting to do is ground moral judgement in empirical science. — Wayfarer

Read what I've written rather than make lazy assumptions. That's exactly what I'm arguing against.

read the quote from Wittgenstein again - this is saying that is precisely what cannot be done. ‘The sense of the world must lie outside the world’ - you’re not going to square that with naturalism. — Wayfarer

I don't think so. I think he's just saying that values cannot be of the world, they must if they exist at all (crucial contingent), be of outside the world. But the world is all there is, so they must be transcendent, ie nonsense. They might be important nonsense, but they are not sensical.

“Neither the Tractatus nor the Notebooks contains any argument or reasoning to establish the existence of values or their absolute character."

World and Life As One, Martin Stokhof

"It is raining outside" - when and if if spoken sincerely - is spoken by a language user who believes that it is raining outside. — creativesoul

Right. So now you have to ask yourself why this is the case. Why is it that "It is raining outside" - when and if if spoken sincerely - is spoken by a language user who believes that it is raining outside?

What is the necessary link which makes it impossible for someone to sincerely say "It's raining outside" (a statement about the state of affairs of the world), when they believe it is not (a state of their internal mind)