It's perhaps not much used in computational logic. A tautology is what is true under any consistent substitution, and so regardless of the assignment of truth values.

But yes, B does follow from A & B, as you said. Hence my reading of P1 as an existential generalisation, another inference from a single line. From f(a) we can infer ∃(x)f(x).

But I'd understand to be referring to the rest of the supposed argument, which is problematic.

That certain text is written in a given language isn't the sort of thing that would be a hinge proposition, — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, yes it is. That this sentence is in English is something you cannot doubt, in the act of reading it. It's a neat example of

341. That is to say, the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn. — OC

"This is in English" is exempted from doubt by our reading it. To doubt that it is a statement of English one would have to supose that it does not say that it is in English.

You do not get a choice as to whether to see it as in English or not.

Now to be sure, there might be a language in which the sentence "This is in English" meant what in English we mean by "The cat is on the mat". If this were so, and you were familiar with that language, you might justifiably wonder whether the marks "This is in English" ment that the sentence was in English or that the cat was on the mat. But that would be to doubt what you were reading. If you take the sentence as saying that it is in English, then you cannot also doubt that it is in English. And if you take it as saying that the cat is on the mat, then you will cast into doubt the whole of this post, along with the rest of the forums and a large part of what you know. If that is what you want to do, then there is not much point in continuing this discussion.

Hence,

343. But it isn't that the situation is like this: We just can't investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put.

Notice that "we are forced to rest content with assumption"; we are not offered a choice here, such as that there is only one line through a given point that is parallel to another line, or that If A is true then ~A must be false. If we are to deal in euclidean Geometry, we are forced to accept the Parallel Postulate; and if we would deal in classical logic, we are forced to assume the excluded middle.

The Parallel Postulate is constitutive of Euclidean Geometry, and Excluded Middle is constitutive of classical logic.

A proposition is not a hinge in any absolute sense, but just in virtue of the role it takes on in a language game. So the same proposition may be a hinge in one game but not in another.

P1) Experience, the subject, is a conscious event that is informative and coherent
C1) So, there must be a substance, the object, that contains the information and is coherent#1 — MoK

Might be an existential generalisation: Experience is "informative and coherent" therefore something is "informative and coherent"

Experience is coherent, therefore something is coherent.

The object cannot directly perceive its content — MoK

...is pretty obtuse. However, a thermostat "perceives" the temperature, it's content. If the information is not "perceived" by the thermostat then it could not turn on the heater. And here's the rub; if substance dualism is correct, and there are two different substances, then the problem becomes how they interact. If mind is a seperate substance to body, how is it that a body can be perceived by a mind, and how is it that a mind can change a body?

I am not interested in reasoning here. — MoK

Then there is no more to be said.

I don't think it's a tautology, it's not saying exactly the same thing twice. — bert1

In logic a tautology is a statement that is true by it's logical form, such as (A&B)⊃B.

Fixed - thanks for spotting it.

...assumptions... — Count Timothy von Icarus

There is something odd about the claim that we assume that this sentence is in English. Hinge propositions are not mere assumptions. Suggesting that they are looks like shoehorning new ideas into old conceptual apparatus.

Games come about as a result of constitutive rules.

See John Searle’s work on speech acts, where he differentiates between constitutive rules that create the possibility of a certain activity, like "checkmate ends the game of chess", and regulative rules that manage existing activities, such as traffic laws. Constitutive rules create the game as such—without them, the game wouldn’t exist.

Emotions are not the beginning and end of ethical deliberation. There is more to ethical truths than just the expression of an individual's emotional response.

Emotivism denies this, in various ways.

I don't know how many times I've said that hinge beliefs are considered true — Sam26

Well,

Let me explain it one more time why hinges aren’t propositionally true. — Sam26

Hinges, hinge beliefs and hinge propositions...

Ok, if belief is not about either truth or trust, you've lost me.

:wink:

Part of Wittgenstein's response might have been an admonition to look - that despite the apparent problem, "and yet language works!"


Like my answer to implies, there is a way of understanding a rule that is shown in following or going against it, in specific cases. It's what we do.

More likely he would have reached for that poker...

It's all going to hell, man. — frank

Well, the USA is fucked. The rest of us will have to learn to accomodate that fact. We'll get by without them. The details will need to be worked out. That's part of what this election is now about.

The Orthodox domination of the secondary literature on private language was largely ended by Saul Kripke’s account of Wittgenstein’s treatment of rules and private language, in which Wittgenstein appears as a sceptic concerning meaning... Kripke’s Wittgenstein, real or fictional, has become a philosopher in his own right, and for many people, it is not an issue whether the historical Wittgenstein’s original ideas about private language are faithfully captured in this version. — SEP

FIne. Perhaps he did not do violence, so much as changed the subject.

do you assent that the imagined red and green are different experiences? — J

No. Red and green may be experienced, but they are not experiences - not qualia, because nothing is.

It's not just that the red in my imagining might be the green in yours, but that the comparison cannot be made. Red and green, like all words, are inherently communal, not private.

I agree about not prolonging this with color phenomenology — J

Too late.

I disagree that Kripke does violence to Witt. — frank

Yeah, I understand that, from previous conversations. Kripke has fun with a misdiagnosis of PI. I maintain that PI§201 and thereabouts answer Kripke. And I think mine the more standard response.

Where is the demonstration? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Demonstration? Were is the "demonstration" that this text is in English? Where is the "demonstration" that this is a hand?

That last paragraph in the article. Quine advertises it as "a final sweeping observation", but it seems to be claiming littler more than that truth functionality requires substitutional transparency.

Hence over to Davidson, and interpreting natural languages in formal first order terms, as truth functional. And we arrive at the nineteen eighties.

Meh. Moyal-Sharrock tries something like this, taking "belief" to mean "trust" alone. The trouble is that this is not how it is more widely understood. Hence things such as

Anglophone philosophers of mind generally use the term “belief” to refer to the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true. — Belief

and

Most contemporary philosophers characterize belief as a “propositional attitude”.

Few beliefs are openly the result of "judgement", if by that is meant explicit ratiocination. That some belief is indubitable does not imply that it is unstatable. If a belief is not true, it cannot be used to justify another belief.

That beliefs can be put into the form "I believe that p" where p is some proposition is pretty much constitutive of the philosophical conversation about belief.

Moyal-Sharrock presents a divergence from, rather than an elucidation of, On Certainty. Not unlike Kripkenstein.

Does Wittgenstein demonstrate things like... — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, yes. Pretty much from the get go of the Tractatus, truth belongs to propositions, what is the case can be said to be the case, and the limits of our language are the limits of our world. Hinge propositions are not tautologies, not mere axioms or truisms.

Good grief.

I'm somewhat surprised that you attempted to answer 's question, at your accepting the presumption that being red is an "experience".

Ah well. Yet anther discussion of the phenomenology of colour will only help the length of my thread.

Given recent indiscretions, to what extent can we rely on the US as a member of the Five Eyes?

Looks like NZ is no longer the weak link...

No - you are leading me astray here. A fundamental tension in my own account is between language as use, after Wittgenstein, and the truth-functional approach of Davidson, after Quine. I've been allowed to mix the two up over the last page or so, and so have not had to face the strain between these two approaches.

That is, in using Wittgenstein against Quine I've neglected the problems that might cause for Davidson.

So this hasn't finished.

And I still need to sort that last argument, from the final paragraph of the article.

Sure.

Pretty much.

Cheers! I guess I am a bit like Charlie Brown to Meta's Lucy...

Not at all. And I don't try, I do...

"Knowing that" is dependent on "knowing how", in that one can only present a true sentence if one knows how to present a sentence. This is an outcome of looking towards use rather than meaning, since the use to which a piece of language is put is as much a doing as a saying.

Yes, that is what I am disagreeing with.

I do agree with your rejection of 's attempt to limit the applicability of these ideas.

If, as Wittgenstein says, Moore's propositions are not known, then they are not epistemological, i.e., not justified or true. — Sam26

Not known as propositions. They are known as in knowing how to ride a bike. "Here is a hand" is a recipe for how to play the game of dealing and speaking about physical objects. Not a knowing that, but a knowing how.

↪Banno My point is trying to clarify different uses of truth in our language. And the difference in the roles of truth in our systems of belief. — Sam26

They are not different uses of "truth". They are different uses to which the proposition is put by the language game. Some propositions stand within the game, others set the game up. Those that set the game up cannot generally be doubted within the game. Hence the game hinges on them.

Two different sorts of hinges: the constitutive rules such as "the bishop moves diagonally", that set out how one thing counts as another... and the basic statements such as "here is a hand"... unless "here is a hand" is understood as a constitutive rules, "This counts as a hand..."

Show me how time is a physical quantity. — Metaphysician Undercover

I can't. All I can do is lead the donkey to the water. I can't make him drink.

Can you show me a physics text that does not use time?

'cause, you see, as has been mentioned before, your grasp of physics is, shall we say, eccentric?

So better to pay it no attention.

...but I want to say that Zeno's paradoxes are not problems of measurement at all. — Moliere

Yep.

I think this lays out a good difference between truth and measurement — Moliere

No. The measurement is true. Specifying the degree of error does not render the measurement untrue. The tank really does contain 25±1 litres.

341. That is to say, the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.
342. That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted.
343. But it isn't that the situation is like this: We just can't investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put.

Hinge propositions are foundational— truth is not a property they possess but a role in epistemological language games. — Sam26

And yet they are true. If they were not, then the door could not move, the investigation could not take place.

I can't say I agree with your first statement — Moliere

Good, becasue it is nonsense. A "non- physical" measurement of a physical quantity... what would be your non-physical units for the fuel left in the tank - not litres, since they are physical.

Physical measurements are not infinitely precise, nor is such precision needed.

Yes to accuracy agains precession.

But it's not a "fib" at all; the tank really is a quarter full, ±5%. It's a truth.

One thing that is very clear here is that some folk do not understand errors. Error is fundamental to physics.

See, for more, Introduction to Error and Uncertainty.

There's that, and then there's the philosophically more interesting view expressed here:

Each measurement has a certain amount of uncertainty, or wiggle room. Basically, there’s an interval surrounding your measurement where the true value is expected to lie.

...the presumption that there is a true value; that given infinite precision we could set out the actual value as a real number. There is no reason to supose this to be true.

Literalism again. — Hanover

Any declaration can be made compatible with any theory with the addition of suitable ad hoc hypotheses.

I do much prefer literalism. Especially over sophistry.

"Genocide" is not so easy to pin down as head-stomping. What says the "moral force"? Do we need "Moral Jedi" to do the interpretation?

like an explanation for why boys face longer exclusions in schools for equivalent transgressions — fdrake

...and why more men are in gaol. It's very easy to point the finger at schools becasue they are examined in microscopic detail, and the data is ready at hand, but the ailments need not be peculiar to school communities so much as more easily identifiable in school communities. You can see the misbehaviour more easily in school statistics than in the broader community.

And then go watch a movie where the solution is more often than not found in being more violent than your opponent.

There's a lot of hocuspocus in schools, a lot of political interference and, at least in English speaking countries, a failure to acknowledge the expertise of teachers.

How did we get on to this sidequest?