Here come the tu quoque replies.

They are logically questionable. They attack the person, not the claim. They shift focus from argument to biography. But mostly, tu quoque's a continuation of that very authoritarianism - If only the perfectly consistent may critique others, no one may critique anything - except the philosopher kings. This is at best a recipe for epistemic paralysis — no norms can be defended, because any attempt to do so can be deflected with tu quoque.

Your logical fallacy is...

So I'll go back to this:

My suspicion is that (the Grand Theory Of All) provides a rhetorical tool for authoritarianism. It's the elite philosopher kings who really understand which flower is beautiful and which plain. — Banno

The danger is not just when those in authority tell themselves stories free of critique, but stories that only reinforce their authority, not justifying it so much as entrenching it; stories that silence dissent, or only permit dissent of a certain, agreeable sort.

Imagine an Aristotelian who only allows the use of Aristotelian logic.

This Aristotelian insists that all valid reasoning must proceed via syllogism, that the law of non-contradiction is inviolable, and that every proposition must be either true or false — no tertium quid. No paraconsistent logic, no many-valued systems, no relevance logic, and certainly no quantum superpositions.

Anyone presenting a counterexample is either misled or misusing language. If it seems like a contradiction can be true, the Aristotelian says, you must have failed to grasp the essence of the terms.

This Aristotelian doesn’t just believe in Aristotle’s logic — they’ve made it a gatekeeping method. No proposition that requires another logical system can even get in the door. That’s not reasoned rejection; it’s methodological foreclosure.

Of course, that would never happen.

What do you have in mind when thinking of Hume as a builder? — Moliere

His History of England, surely!

It is relevant because the thread has veered into the question of authoritarian versus liberal thinking. — Janus

The topic is philosophical method. Your posts are bang on topic.

...we seem to be dealing with arguments for authority. Could such arguments stand without also allowing arguments from authority to stand? — Janus

That's a fine question.

The fallacy of arguments from authority is an informal fallacy - it's not a logical fallacy as such, not false becasue of the structure of the argument. it's not a fallacy to pay attention to the thoughts of someone who has authority...

Listen to your doctor, for fuck's sake. Then question them to make sure they have paid attention to you and know your circumstances and are up to date on the research!

Authority does not grant immunity to critique. Not even for priests.

But that for and from bit needs some thinking...

Would this not mean that some people might practice compassion even whilst holding an ostensibly intolerant belief system? — Tom Storm

One does what one can...

Say some more on this. — Tom Storm

Well, we might shift the philosophical weight from ontology or doxastic content to praxis and procedure.

What matters would not be the abstract truth of a belief, but how that belief functions within a system (logic, science, discourse); gets used (for justification, prediction, coercion); survives confrontation (with evidence, argument, or rival beliefs) and integrates with shared methods of reasoning or inquiry.

Ever hear of Fred D'Agostino? D’Agostino’s take: Instead of asking, “What do we all believe?” we ask, “What kind of practice allows us to live together with our differences?”

I was more thinking about whether having very strong beliefs in philosophical absolutes and/or first-principle-type foundations has to go hand in hand with deism or theism. — J

Oh, not at all. There's a lot here about foundational beliefs and relations to hinge propositions and so on that would be fun to go through.

And there is the tu quoque reply, of course, which is irrefutable, since we all have base beliefs.

I think the issue is methodological - not about what you believe but what you do with it.

I'm not sure what you mean — Sam26

Just that whatever constraint one puts on a language game, someone may find a game that undermines that constraint...

A puzzlement more than a point.

Cool.

It seems that the fundamental opinions of some are less malleable than those of others. I find that interesting and confronting. That resistance to revision one sees even in intelligent, well educated folk.

I guess it kinda grounds my OP - a moral preference for doubt.

What is your account? — Tom Storm

Not dissimilar, but i might place much more emphasis on the community than the individual. Not a "personal web of beliefs" - it's public, and learned, and shared.

And so available for discussion (and revision) in a way that private ideas are not.


Which is what we do, here.

I don't think the target statement ought to be framed in terms of criteria that are different in every instance. — J

I agree.

there are certainly facts within the discipline which will suggest to us what such criteria might be, including previous success in advancing the discipline and provoking exciting new questions. — J

Yes - doesn't this amount to insisting that the discipline at least be self-consistent?

We might even supose after Feyerabend, that a practice could be successful becasue of a disagreement on first principles, of the sort that Tim has in mind; that a tension between fundamentals might well lead to progress. Think of the tension in physics concerning wave-particle duality at the beginning of last century.

Feyerabend would say this is precisely how science often works: progress through pluralism, through the friction between incompatible paradigms or first principles. Agreement can produce stability, but disagreement can produce invention.

"But how does this keep arbitrariness out?" Consistency does this work, seems to me. That together with some variant on Davidson's triangulation, keeping the community - and we are talking about groups of people, not individuals - on a common topic.

I like the method suggested here - it fits in with my own desire to find common ground quite well.

So I suggest that we allow @Count Timothy von Icarus to choose the example, as an act of good will.

:lol:

There's nothing in belief in god that has to lead to this sort of... antagonism (?)

And nothing in disbelief, either.

I am guessing that you would put that down to being built on top of our emotional preferences, too. But the liberal/authoritarian dimension isn't an accepted emotional fundamental, so far as I am aware - more a part of pop psychology.

SO I don't think that philosophical differences are ultimately "explained" by psychology. I suspect you do?

I thinks the questions can be separated. It's perfectly possible to take a foundationalist approach while remaining agnostic... — J

Perhaps. I gather that would involve adopting a liberal attitude to interacting with others, accepting that they may have different foundational attitudes without actively engaging with them.

Still writing a reply to your other post.

Generally, when people hold foundational positions, they are like arrows pointing toward the place they want to arrive at. — Tom Storm

...and everyone holds foundational positions...

As you say.

So a large part of the discussion should be about what we can agree on, despite those differences.

And that is basically a liberal stance. As against the authoritarian stance, that one way or another we must force agreement.

Do you think such an approach is one that assumes theism and some of the philosophical scaffolding which supports it? — Tom Storm

Well, I was attempting to avoid god, but you asked.

Yep.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Tim and Leon are so adamantly disagreeing with the idea that one can coherently maintain an agnostic position.

It's odd, isn't it, to be arguing in a philosophy forum for the validity of saying "I don't know".

Odd that such an stance should need any defence at all.

Cheers. Others know even less about logic, but post their opinion anyway.

Kripke's account leads to forms of antirealism, with which I am not overly happy. So I'm not offering it as an absolute answer here - just as an example that shows the problem with Tim's attempt to equate not knowing something with not knowing anything.

Thus, they hit all your criteria for producing a correct narrative.
— Count Timothy von Icarus

This is where it goes wrong. — J

Yep.

Usually I find myself arguing against idealism or antirealism, but here I find myself against Tim's excessive realism.

There are various arguments that could be deployed against realism here, if it were to be explicitly expressed.

I've explicitly shown how Tim's reply is dependent on an invalid argument. Several times. I'm not sure there is more to be said.

Your habit of removing the automatic link on a quote - what's that about?

I don't know if OJ killed his wife or not. I've not paid the case much attention, not having much interest in the biography of self-entitled 'mercan celebrities. It's your example, not mine.

I am happy to work with whatever example you might choose, becasue it is the logic that is at issue. Choose another.

And again, your use of LEM needs explanation.

The case, for Tom Storm's edification, that corresponds to the notion "undecided" in denying LEM would not be: "I don't know the answer to 'idealism, psychophysical parallelism, god…,'" but rather "these positions are neither true, nor false." — Count Timothy von Icarus

That ain't so, for the reasons given in my reply to Tom, above.

I was merely making a joke. — Tom Storm

We don't do those. This is serious.

:wink:

Tim's reply makes quite a few assumptions. His reply is that we must assign "these positions are neither true, nor false". But that's not so. We have the option of not assigning a truth value at all.

Now this is exactly what Kripke does in his paper on truth. He begins by explicitly not assigning a truth value to any statement in his system; then assigning "true" to the tautologies; and "true" or "false" to other sentences as they are interpreted. The result is a set of true and false sentences and a set of sentence with no truth value.

The advantage is that liar sentences - "this sentence is false" - are never assigned a truth value. Quite clever, really.

Another interesting aspect is that assigning truth values becomes a process.

And yes, it is legitimate to think of these as the ones for which the truth value is unknown. That's just using Kripke's system to modal epistemic issues.

Glad that you are reading along.

This is still saying some positions aren't true/correct. To say "all positions are true or undecided, and at least some are undecided" is still saying that not every position is true. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Your comment was:

Well, in ruling out, "anything goes," you are denying some positions. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You said that if a statement is ruled out, it is denied. Now you want to change that to if a statement is ruled out, it is not true. That is a shift in your position, a partial and begrudging acknowledgement of some of what has been said here, so we will count it as a positive move.

If you cannot ever tell anyone else they are wrong... — Count Timothy von Icarus

Of course we can sometimes tell when a statement is wrong. Nothing in what I or J has said says otherwise. So what you say here is way off.

Again, the point is the logical one, that we can say of a statement that it is true, and we can say that it is false, and thirdly sometimes we can say that we don't know it's truth value, and that doing so does not, as your statement quoted above implies, lead immediately to "anything goes".

I'll bold that, becasue it seems to keep being forgotten.

And so much of what you say after that is irrelevant, and misleading. It's just not what has been suggested.

If we are to continue this discussion, it might be kind of you to at least acknowledge the logical point bolded above. Then we might have a common ground. If you think there is an error in the logic, set it out. If, for instance, you think it violates LEM, set out how you understand LEM and how it is violated.

We'll see.

So far as epistemology goes, it's the equivalent of saying "I don't know". If that's avoidance, maybe.

"I don't know" might be seen as antithetical to a philosophy that can explain everything. So presumably has more in common with dissection than discourse.

I mean, what's the point here re epistemology? — Count Timothy von Icarus

You can no doubt see where I am going.

We agree that if we allow a contradiction, a statement that is both true and false, in propositional logic with a binary truth assignment (true or false), anything goes.

But if we instead allow a statement to have an undecided value, there is no contradiction and it does not follow that anything goes.

Well, in ruling out, "anything goes," you are denying some positions. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not necessarily. We might not be denying a position, and not affirming it, but leaving it undecided.

but is a violation of LEM. — Count Timothy von Icarus

How?

Over to you again. Explain how allowing a sentence to be undecided violates the LEM.

Maybe begin by explaining which version of the LEM you would use.

This by way of a request for clarification.

What's an example of an "undecided" historical or scientific fact? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Either OJ Simpson really killed his wife or he didn't. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That'll do. If we allow it to remain undecided, does a contradiction follow?

Whatever. Seems to me that just repeats the same error.

Both.

If we allow a case in which it remains undecided if some sentence is true or false, then do we have a contradiction?

Treat them as seperate cases, if you like.

I am saying that claims like: "Bin Laden was the leader of the 9/11 attacks" and "he was also not involved with them at all," should indicate that at least one cannot be true — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ok. Is there a problem in allowing this to be undecided?

I don't think I suggested anything remotely like this. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ok. So I've misunderstood you.

So explain to me what is in error here:

Tim's objection, so far as I can make sense of it, is that if we allow a case in which it remains undecided if some sentence is true or false, then the concatenation of sentences contains a contradiction and anything goes. — Banno

Let's focus on this in the hope of reaching some agreement.

In what post did I advance this "argument?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

All of them.

Indeed, if the principle of non-contradiction cannot be specified as a general epistemic principle then it seems obvious that contradiction is allowed. — Count Timothy von Icarus

And yet non-classical logics are coherent. Non-classical logics, such as paraconsistent logics, do allow for contradictions without collapse, and they are mathematically coherent and well-developed.


Added: Here, explain to me where the following goes astray:

Tim's objection, so far as I can make sense of it, is that if we allow a case in which it remains undecided if some sentence is true or false, then the concatenation of sentences contains a contradiction and anything goes. — Banno

Be charitable.

I think the form of Count Timothy von Icarus' statement is sufficient to shift the burden of proof onto the one who denies that it is a true binary. — Leontiskos

I would love for someone to point me to the place where J provided a third option. — Leontiskos

He is providing examples of where the binary does not hold. That is different to pointing to places where there is a third option. See . Note 's response. Consider what it is they are agreeing on.

I think the form of Count Timothy von Icarus' statement is sufficient to shift the burden of proof onto the one who denies that it is a true binary. — Leontiskos

I don't see how what you say here forms an argument. I do not see why Tim's statement implies anything about burden of proof. Stating that all statements are binary does not show that all statements are binary, nor assign a burden to those whop deny that all statements are binary.

It assumes we have some kind of target, but it does not assume that we have the conclusion. — Leontiskos

That's not how it looks to me. It looks more as if you have reached a conclusion and are looking for an argument that will hit it.

But I think we must have a target for our construction. — Leontiskos

Not my experience in curriculum development or in building co-design. Indeed it seems to me that the cases in which we share a "target", beyond a vague agreement as to the direction we might head, are rare. Have you ever been in a conversation were what was at issue was, what will we do? Not all inquiry is about hitting a known mark; sometimes, it’s about discovering what might be worth doing or understanding together. That’s a different model—less like archery, more like building without a blueprint.

Why does J continually fail to answer such questions? — Leontiskos

To my eye, J is providing comprehensive answers. But the folk he is talking to do not see that there is a problem with their questions, rather than with J's answers. That is, J has been providing examples of where the binary does not hold, but this has gone unrecognised.

Further, why should it be up to us to demonstrate that the binary does not hold, and not up to you to demonstrate that it does?

A step back. Look at your example of this discussion being like shooting an arrow - to shoot well, you need a target. But that assumes that there is a target, that we already have the conclusion. Perhaps a better analogy would be were we are working together on a construction, but do not agree as to the final result. We might reach agreement on fitting this bit you made in with the bit I made, and work together towards something satisfactory to us both.

Why need we presume the conclusion?

Count Timothy von Icarus's "some determinate content" vs. "no determinate content" is clearly a binary. Don't you agree? — Leontiskos

Sure. And in setting this up as a binary, he already forecloses on the possibility of it not being a binary. He presumes what was to be shown. That's why @J fairly suggests he account is uncharitable.

So, can we agree that sometimes determinate/indeterminate are not contradictories?

And that not every situation is reducible to a binary?

And that there is a place for some nuance?

And maybe, that wisdom might sometimes not have a determinate content?

(and yes, I admit I hit you back first. )

Some here seem to have a prejudice against the very notion of contradictory pairs. For example: — Leontiskos

Others have an obsession with the same.

Determinate/indeterminate is not a contradictory pair. Many things are partially determined. Borderline concepts - "baldness"; mathematical forms such as $0^0$; quantum states which are determinate in probability, indeterminate in value.

See if you can reply to these examples, rather than indulging in personal insults.

Count Timothy von Icarus is using determinate/indeterminate as a contradictory pair — Leontiskos

Exactly!

Thanks for your help. :lol:

Socrates is a man.
All men are mortal.
Therefore Socrates is a mortal.

Is about the words "man" and "Socrates" and not ever about men and Socrates? Wouldn't this lead to a thoroughgoing anti-realism and an inability of language to signify anything but language, such that books on botany are about words and interpretations and never about plants (only "plants")? — Count Timothy von Icarus

What makes the syllogism valid is that whatever you substitute for "Socrates" "Man" and "Mortal", the syllogism holds. That's why we can write it as ((f(a) & U(x)f(x)⊃g(x)) ⊃g(a).

It is not about Socrates and Man, it is about the structure of the three sentences. It is about the language used.

Logical validity is a property of forms, not of names or referents. This formal property does not imply that logic is only about language, nor that language is only about itself. In fact, the ability to generalize over arbitrary constants (like “Socrates”) is what allows logic to apply to the world. Far from anti-realist, this is precisely what gives logic its extensional power.

Banno has helped me understand Davidson and Wittgenstein -- without his efforts on these fora I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have cracked that nut on my own. — Moliere

Cheers. You are most welcome.

If I wanted to formalize it a bit... — Srap Tasmaner

It's overkill, no doubt, but we might formalise it a lot.

Supose we have a list of sentences, A, B, C...

The assumption, from Tim and others, is that each of these sentences is either true, or it is false.

We list all the true sentences: { A & B & ~C & D....} and so on. Tim's objection, so far as I can make sense of it, is that if we allow a case in which it remains undecided if some sentence is true or false, then the concatenation of sentences contains a contradiction and anything goes.

So Tim sees the existence of an undecided sentence as leading to a contradiction. {A & B & C &~C & D...} implies C and ~C, and so anything goes.

But what is being suggested is that rather than a string concatenating every sentence, we can have instead groups of sentences that are consistent with each other, even if not consistent with the whole. That is, we can have (A & B & C) as consistent with each other, and perhaps (B & ~C & D) as consistent with each other, without contradiction. {(A & B & C) v (B & ~C & D)} does not imply (C & ~C).

{(A & B & C) v (B & ~C & D} is consistent, despite including both C and ~C.

So in 's example, (A & B & C) may be how we evaluate Beethoven's music, while we evaluate his contemporary Hummel, as (B & ~C & D), and we do this without contradiction.

Tim's insistence that a contradiction must follow is simply invalid. We can happily insist on a sentence being true in one circumstance, and false in another, without contradiction.

And all this in propositional calculus, without resorting to non-classical logic.

@Count Timothy von Icarus, I do not think that you have yet addressed this. "Explaining why the distinction is not truly contradictory" is exactly what the above argument does.