Comments

  • What is faith
    ↪javra
    Hu?
  • Australian politics
    Then, like a swollen river that has broken bank and wall,
    The human flood came pouring with the red flags over all,
    And kindled eyes all blazing bright with revolution's heat,
    And flashing swords reflecting rigid faces in the street.
    Pouring on, pouring on,
    To a drum's loud threatening beat,
    And the war-hymns and the cheering of the people in the street.     — Faces in the street
  • Australian politics
    Supermarkets respond to steel tariffs by increasing grocery prices by 50%
  • What is faith
    Is murder moral if we agree it is? I say not. — Hanover

    Me, too. So we agree on that... If we disagreed, there would be more to say.

    Does that make our agreement subjective? Is our agreement relative? Or is this talk of subjective/objective relative/(...absolute?) just fluff?

    Not at all sure what your point is.
  • What is faith
    If we can make the Good, is that not subjectivism? — Hanover

    Dunno. what's 'subjectivism"?

    Note the "we". Not Me. So, where is us deciding what to do "subjective"?
  • Tortoise wins (Zeno)
    ↪Gregory
    You are not the first to mistake their misunderstandings for something profound. I suggest you read and try to understand Cantor's diagonal argument - you should be able to Google a version you find agreeable. See if you can read it sympathetically, rather the deciding that it is wrong from the outset; that way you can avoid confirmation bias. it's hard stuff, and if you manage to see how it works you may find you have done something quite satisfying.
  • Tortoise wins (Zeno)
    ↪Metaphysician Undercover
    Strictly, when properly stated, that's undecidable. But as I say, you need a mathematician.

    Same with the odd vs whole — Gregory
    Well, no, since for every whole there is an odd, as has been shown.

    That you misunderstand something does not make it wrong.
  • Tortoise wins (Zeno)
    No you don't know how a countable infinity relates to uncountable and their qualities before the argument starts. — Gregory
    Yeah, we do. We learn how to count, then notice that whatever number we chose, there is a bigger number. Or most of us do, around the age of seven or eight. Then some see Hilbert's Hotel and the diagonal argument and go "Holly shite! there are numbers that cannot be counted..."

    You couldn't try — Gregory
    But I did try, in the post to which you are responding. You can't seem to recognise that the responses you are receiving actually answer your questions. It's odd. But it's not about maths, it's about you.
  • Tortoise wins (Zeno)
    Then state my argument, or at least ONE of them, in your own words — Gregory
    I can't, becasue they are incoherent. Take
    We haven't established what infinities are — Gregory
    Yeah, we have, at least enough to be getting on with. For every number there is a next number.

    Why couldn't (calculus's) foundations be wrong? — Gregory
    They cannot be wrong, any more than 4+4+2=10 can be wrong. But it can be misunderstood.
  • Tortoise wins (Zeno)
    ...there is more to the continuous number line than the points which are the real numbers — Metaphysician Undercover

    Yep. It is also connected and complete; it has a topological structure. Of course, not all the issues are ironed out and answered. If you want more you will need to talk to a mathematician.
  • Tortoise wins (Zeno)
    ↪ssu


    Here it is again:
    ↪Gregory
    A refusal to recognise the answer when it is set out before them.

    It reeks of some sort of anti-intellectualism, or at least anti-expertise.

    Explains a lot of recent politics, too.
  • Tortoise wins (Zeno)
    ↪ssu
    True enough.

    Your problem is that you simply don't understand the concept of infinity — ssu
    More than that, there seems also to be a resistance to learning about infinity - hence flimsy response "If all the rooms are filled you can't move 1 to 2 and 3 to room 4 because all the infinite rooms are already filled". Notice how the OP, which has a relatively simple answer, was exploded into quantum nonsense and "dimensions and contrivances" with such glee, within a few posts of the OP?

    Folk don't want an answer...

    So what is it they want?
  • What is faith
    Moral rules don't help normal people. They exist for the soul purpose of condemnation. Only those who were born to condemn care about moral realism. — frank
    Morality is not algorithmic.

    Same answer for
    ↪Tom Storm
    . There's no criteria, like virtue ethics or capability framework, that will work in all cases for all questions; and yet we have to do the evaluation, so we have an iterative process, but in which each iteration changes the rule being iterated. So the list of virtues and the list of capabilities changes over time.

    What is the way we settle these matters? Well, that's part of these matters.
  • What is faith
    ↪Tom Storm
    Some folk supose that thinking of morals as made but not found devalues them, as if they were as a result arbitrary. On the contrary, it makes our actions central and of the greatest import.
  • What is faith
    ↪frank
    Your somewhat cryptic assertions don't seem to show anything. A group of humans sits around a primordial campfire chewing on bison. One of them says, "Hey! Why don't we love each other?" They nail him to a tree.
  • Tortoise wins (Zeno)
    "if you only look at times BEFORE Achilles reaches the tortoise, then it will appear as if Achilles never reaches the tortoise". — Agree-to-Disagree
    There are an infinity of intervals before Achilles passes the tortoise, each one half the time of the previous, and so with a finite sum. The process of Achilles passing the tortoise therefore takes a finite time.

    End of story, really.
  • Quine: Reference and Modality
    ↪J
    It's not that meaning is use. Explanations in terms of meaning invariably reach a point were one asks the meaning of "meaning" or some such, running against the limits of that sort of approach. The admonition here is to stop looking at meaning and look instead at what one is doing - to look instead at use. This transcends the discussion of meaning, replacing what is said by what can be shown.

    Wittgenstein already won this particular game by pointing out that it is not so much what we say as want we do that is of import.
  • What is faith
    If you want to make the argument that morals are not relative to time, place, and the peculiarities of different cultures, you can, but you're going to have argue either some mystical creator of morality or you're going to have argue something inherent within the constitution of the human DNA that demands them. — Hanover
    A poor argument, if that's what this is. Devine command and evolutionary necessity do not cover all the options. This also makes the mistake of thinking that morals are found, not made - discovered, not intended.
  • What is faith
    If arguing from a purely secular point of view, morals are just another form of law, etiquite, custom, or tact. — Hanover

    But what of ethics?
  • Quine: Reference and Modality
    ↪J
    I'm not seeing a difference. Won't you also have to explain what a side and an angle are? How would you do that? Is your point that red is a simple and square, a construction? Is "angle" a simple or a construct? What about "side"?

    ↪J
    Yep, tautologies are true because they remain true under substitution - and that is becasue of the very definition of extensionality. So a=a or p v ~p are analytic because no matter what you substitute in to a, it remains true. Same for any tautology.

    But a Batchelor of Arts need not be married, and a bachelor might be married to his work.

    That is, Quine accepts the analytic/synthetic distinction when it can be given a firmly extensional definition.

    So far as I understand the sort of formal systems @sime has in mind, analyticity is defined in terms of construction rather than substitution. The identity a=a is always constructible, without the need for external verification. Not so for "p v ~p". Nor for "Bachelors are unmarried".

    So yes, synonymy requires verification - "witness".
  • Tortoise wins (Zeno)
    ↪ssu
    Nice video.

    If all the rooms are filled you can't move 1 to 2 and 3 to room 4 because all the infinite rooms are already filled. — Gregory
    If you were right then you could specify who does not get a room. In the first case, each individual is assigned to the room one more than the room they are in, and so every individual gets a new room. The person who was in room two is now in room three; the person who was in room three is now in room four; and so on. In the second case, each individual is assigned to the room twice the number of the room they are in. Again, each individual gets a room. In the third case, in which and infinity of new guests arrives, and the spreadsheet is used, each individual is still assigned a room. But for the party bus, the diagonal argument shows that there will always be an individual who does not get a room.

    This is what happens when you try to assign a whole number to every point on a segment of the continuum. There are too many points on the segment to be counted.

    But this is a different story to the one we started with. Achilles starts behind the tortoise, which has a small head start. By the time he reaches the tortoise’s starting point, the tortoise has moved forward a shorter distance. Achilles then reaches this new position, but the tortoise has moved again. This process repeats infinitely, but the distances form a geometric series that converges to a finite sum. The total time taken also converges to a finite limit. Achilles reaches the tortoise’s position in a finite time and then surpasses it. The paradox arises only if one mistakenly assumes that infinite steps must require infinite time, which they do not.
  • Tortoise wins (Zeno)
    ↪Metaphysician Undercover
    They don't. The continuum is not just a set of points.
  • Tortoise wins (Zeno)
    ↪ssu
    Yep.

    Take all the points on a segment and line each one up one at a time to the whole numbers. — Gregory
    You can't. Between any two points you select, there are infinitely many more points. There are only countably many whole numbers, but far more points in a segment...
  • Tortoise wins (Zeno)
    As I said, I can’t help you.
  • Tortoise wins (Zeno)
    A koch snowflake has a finite area but an infinite boundary. Odd, that. Very nice.
  • Tortoise wins (Zeno)
    See — Gregory

    I see you haven't understood. I doubt I can help. If it is continuous, the by that very fact it is not discreet.
  • Tortoise wins (Zeno)
    ↪Gregory
    While I'm not at all sure of the wisdom of answering here, you can divide it - into bits of the continuum, which are themselves continuous.

    A general rule: if the description you give of something that happens says that it can't happen, you are using the wrong description.
  • Tortoise wins (Zeno)
    ...by treating the open sets of the real line as solid lines and by forgetting the fact that continuum has points, — sime

    A continuous path is not reducible to a mere sequence of points; rather, it is a unified whole in which limits make sense without requiring traversal of individual points.

    Treat it as points, or as a continuum, but not both.
  • Tortoise wins (Zeno)
    Continuous means infinitely dense — Gregory

    No, it doesn't.
  • What is faith
    Who here thinks there is no difference between what they want and what is right?
  • What is faith
    ↪BitconnectCarlos
    Nothing said implies it isn't. But not to the thoughts and feelings of the doer alone.
  • What is faith
    Good point. I guess the response here might be that an emotivist might acknowledge that we may sometimes be compelled to act contrary to our immediate emotions, but would deny that there is an objective "ought" beyond how we feel about it. — Tom Storm
    Hence non-cognitivism rather then emotivism, and the implication that one must think about the situation and not only about one's emotional response. One doesn't just feel, one thinks about consequences, and hence about what one wants to be the case. Setting this out as just (no more than...) an emotional response does not do it justice.

    And what is the place of the word "objective" here? Would it be OK to assert that there is an "ought" in "one ought change the baby's nappy" but no ought in "objectively, one ought change the baby's nappy"?

    Looking at these issues in terms of intent and action and consequences gives us a much more viable framework than "emotion". It moves from doing what you want to doing what you should, and hence away from mere egoism.
  • What is faith
    Murder is wrong because of the way the community reacts to it, — frank
    You sure about that 'because'?

    First off, murder is unlawful killing. Some ways of killing are not unlawful. Is murder wrong becasue it is killing or becasue it is against the law?

    Further, if the community reacts with glee, that makes it OK? Civilised countries have outlawed capital punishment, becasue they consider it immoral.

    It's always a bit more complicated...
  • What is faith
    ↪Tom Storm
    ,
    ↪Sam26
    ,
    ↪frank


    Why should there be only one thing that "drives" our actions or has the "primary role"?

    Isn't it entirely possible for that some act be emotional disgusting or repugnant, and yet you ought do it? Ever changed a nappy? Isn't it a commonplace that you often ought do things in defiance of how you feel? What is courage? And see
    ↪javra
    's examples. The very same actions can be commendable or culpable.

    Ethics as the study of interplay between intent and action, in a social context.
  • Tortoise wins (Zeno)
    ↪sime
    Is your point that Zeno treats motion as a series of steps, while both physics and maths treat it as continuous?

    I'll go along with that.
  • What is faith
    ↪frank
    Ok. If that works for you.

    ↪Hanover
    I really don't care. Seems parochial.
  • Quine: Reference and Modality
    ↪sime
    Thanks, that makes your point clearer.

    So type theory can be used to give a clear account of what is analytic and what is synthetic. This is different to what is necessary and what is possible, the concerns of modal logic. So we now have formal tools at hand with which we can make distinctions that were not available to Quine. Quine rightly dismissed the analytic/synthetic distinction as too vague, and consequently also dismissed modality, which he understood as closely related. Subsequent - or perhaps even consequent - developments have shown us ways to revive these ideas.
  • What is faith
    ↪frank
    It's what you do, not what you feel or think, that counts, isn't it?
  • Quine: Reference and Modality
    Would you want to say that the extension of Square X simply is what we mean by (or define as) a square? — J
    Perhaps bead eight is square. In that case, and given that our domain is just the beads, "...is square" and '...is eight" are extensionally equivalent, and whatever is extensional the case with square things will be extensively the case with bead eight.

    So it does not look as if the choice of red is an issue.

    Take note that "red" and "square" are not proper names.

    Part of what is shown here is the poverty of phenomenological approaches that is simply bypassed by the extensional treatment. We don't need the messy thinking that accompanies trying to explain if and how what you see as red and what I see as red (...or square...) are the same. So ling as we agree that {1,2,3} are red and {8} is square, we can get on.

    A whole philosophical quagmire avoided.
  • What is faith
    ↪Sam26
    ,
    ↪Tom Storm
    The ambiguities around "emotion" are perhaps the reason that the view Tom is espousing is no more often called non-cognitivism, placing the emphasis on the supposed inapplicability of reason to moral sentiments. Much of the literature around Wittgenstein assumes either the interpretation that he took ethics to be outside of language and so not a part of rational discourse, or alternatively that ethics (and aesthetics, even more so) pervades our whole world, showing itself in every aspect of our social lives. The tricky bit might be seeing these as not mutually contradictory.

    There's also a reason that what was once called subjectivism, then emotivism, is now commonly called by philosophers non-cognitivism - names that grew as folk expounding on the topic found it necessary to take more and more into account to defend the basic sentiment that ethics is about how we feel about things, and not so much about what we think about things.

    One major problem here is the separation of what we feel and what we think is no where near as clear and clean a cut as this approach supposes. Another is that what we think and feel tend to the private or subjective, with all the accompanying difficulties.

    We have been encouraged to look to use - not to think, but to look. There is a difference between looking around and seeing how things are, a comparatively passive activity, and looking around to see how things might be changed, both aesthetically and ethically - a far more active process. The activities being undertaken in these two contrasting cases are quite distinct.

    By looking to what we might do, we bypass the opacity of thinking and feeling, refocusing instead on our acts of volition, and how we might change things. Fundamentally, ethics and aesthetics are about what we might do.

    The difference is neatly summed up in Anscombe's list of things from the shop. While the words may be the same, there are two very different uses for the list. We might take the list to the shop and purchase the things on it; in which case we change the world to fit the list; or we might write the things we purchased out in a list, perhaps as a receipt, and so change the list to match the world. The difference here is not in the list but in our intent.

    All this by way of suggesting that it might be our intent that is important in ethical situations rather than our emotional response.
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