Fine.

You seem to have a limited capacity for understanding. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, to be sure, I do not understand how you can maintain such views. There are formal proofs of the consistency of S5, for example. Google it. So again, I'll leave you to it.

Cheers.

I'm wondering if you see the difference between the thrust of the argument in the OP and it's logical validity? One can agree with the conclusion and yet not agree that the argument is valid.

Well this is kind of where I got to 18 days ago on the first thread dedicated to this idea. — Tom Storm

I don't think I saw this, but yes, it looks similar.

I'll leave you to the diplomacy, since it's apparent that I am a part of the conspiracy. I'd count this thread as another example of what I've characterised as the "retired engineer" coming in to fix up all that bad stuff in Ethics by bringing in some hard cold reason, only to demonstrate a lack of understanding of the issues. But that's my biases.

Yep.

From elsewhere,

3. The "Life = Good" Axiom

Life must see itself as good. Any system that undermines its own existence is naturally selected against. Therefore, within the frame of life, the assertion "Life = Good" is a tautological truth. It is not a moral statement; it is an ontological necessity.
Example:
Suicidal ideologies and belief systems ultimately self-terminate and are selected out. What remains, by necessity, are those perspectives and practices that favor survival and propagation. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam persist precisely because they endorse life-affirming principles, even if imperfectly. — James Dean Conroy

The sentiment is that life ought be preserved, and that's not a bad sentiment. But the argument that the opposite view leads to there not being any life is void; perhaps there ought not be any life.

In the end, the argument affirms that life is valuable, but does not demonstrate, let alone prove, that life is valuable.

I'll go a step further.

The argument in the OP seems to rely on the part-syllogism: There cannot be values without life; therefore life is valuable.

Now perhaps most folk would agree that there cannot be values without life, and think life is valuable, and yet agree that the second does not follow from the first.

There is a gap between the "is" of "There cannot be values without life" and the "ought" of "Life is valuable.

So let's try to put the argument, as given together, and see where the problem lies. Most obviously, the interpretation above is not a syllogism, since it has only one premise. So is there a second premise, and if so, what is it?

What was called a "formal" version remains a bit unclear, but seems to be found in the following lines:
1. Without life, there is no subject to generate or interpret value.
2. Life persists by resisting entropy through structure, order, and adaptation, and “Good” can be structurally defined as that which reinforces this persistence.
3. For life to continue, it must operate as if life is good.

It's hard to see how (3) follows from (1) and (2) in any formal way. The idea seems to be that since life does persist, it ought to persist. But that does not follow.

In addition, there remains the obvious question: why ought life continue? Perhaps what ought happen is that life ought be deleted, maybe in order to remove all suffering. Again, I am not advocating this, but pointing out the logical gap in the argument.

Some folk will read this and not see that my counter isn't about whether life is valuable or whether life ought continue, but about the lack of validity in the argument. We cannot move from the observation that there is life, to the conclusion that life is valuable, without introducing an evaluation. We cannot move form that A exists, to that A is valuable; at least not without introducing a second premise - but this premise must introduce the value of A. We can't get form an "ought" to an "is", at least nto int he way suggested in this thread.

I'm sorry, Meta, but your post is again risible. You say no one is restricting themselves to Aristotle and then go and do exactly that. This is on par with your rejection of instantaneous velocity and 0.99...=1. This is the reason I do not usually read nor reply to your posts.

Modal logic has been demonstrated to be consistent. You are simply mistaken.

I think the problem is that your approach doesn't even attempt to rise to the level of a conception from intuitions; and for me it has to in order to have a robust theory. — Bob Ross

Intuitions?

Fucksake.

I'll leave you to it.

If I understand correctly, the fundamental laws of logic exist in all possible worlds, and they are contravened only in impossible worlds. Is that right? — A Christian Philosophy

An odd wording, but not wrong. It gets complex, of course.

As shown in the links above, the logic of possibility and necessity - modal logic - has a strong standing in modern logic. Those who restrict themselves to Aristotle still have difficulties.

This strikes me as a deficient definition. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree. It's not offered as a definition, as I hoped was clear from the previous few pages, where I indulged Austin's method in order to set out the place of "faith" in our language games. It is offered as a way to distinguish faith from trust.

Your reply is that some folk reevaluate some of their beliefs, and yet are still claimed to be faithful. You suggest that the figures of the reformation as counterexamples. But as you yourself point out, Luther and Calvin were not faithful to Catholicism.

There is no claim here that the faithful never make use of an evidence base or change their beliefs.

Ok, so, to you, faith is 'trust in an authority to verify the truth or falsity of a claim in a manner where it is dogmatic'. Is that right? — Bob Ross

Again, no. First becasue faith is not restricted to trust in authority, and second becasue any definition fo that sort will be inadequate, so should not be used.

And again, the argument is not that theist never allowing their beliefs to be reevaluated. The mark of faith is that a belief is maintained under duress. It's extraordinary that this is questioned. This aligns with traditional religious narratives such as Abraham, Job, and Acts of the Martyrs.

Empirically, faith can involve personal conviction, existential commitment, moral vision — not merely obedience to authority. Philosophically, any definition that makes faith into mere dogmatism misses the performative dimension — the way it plays out as loyalty, endurance, and identity.

Faith, unlike ordinary belief or trust, is best understood through its persistence under conditions of strain, doubt, or suffering. It is not a rigid refusal to change, nor merely trust in authority, but a form of commitment that reveals itself when it is hardest to maintain. Definitions that ignore this pragmatic and temporal dimension fail to capture the lived meaning of faith.

Seems odd that religious folk seek to deny this.

Thanks, :lol:

Why is this a thread you should avoid? — James Dean Conroy

Simply becasue of the time that would taken in responding to your misunderstandings.

Maybe later.

Funny, I thought I saw that a few days ago on the ABC, but can't see it now. I wondered if it was old news that news.com.au only just caught up with.

He's right that support for folk in such situations has been stronger from Albo than previous lib PM's.

I think they were just too afraid of offending the US and in any case thought Assange had made his own bed to lie in.

Compulsory Voting in Australia

Electoral Commission page with history, comparison with other countries and so on.

Remember that the compulsion is not to vote so much as to turn up and have your name crossed off the roll. What you do in the voting booth is up to you. There's some as draw a dick and balls.

You again tempt me in to threads I really should just avoid.

A good way to think of an axiom is as constitutive of a language game. So Euclid's Axioms set up the game of plane geometry, there are various axioms that set up propositional logic, and so on. Without these rules there is no game.

Traditionally, axioms are thought of as "self-evident truths", a notion that was always problematic. There's not comeback to someone who says that a truth is not self-evident to them.

This traditional approach might be what James has in mind. I'm not sure. He seems to treat the axiom "Life is the necessary precondition of all value" as if it were self-evident... at least, that seems to be what he means by it being a "structural observation" - that it is somehow inconceivable that it were false. I'm not seeing it.

There's a pretty clear violation of is/ought here, it seems to me. Values are what we want, and facts are how things are, and since nothing in how things are tells us how we want them to be, there is a logical gap to be crossed. But that's not so much about axioms.

Does that help?

The concept of "possible worlds" itself violates the fundamental laws of logic. — Metaphysician Undercover

Good grief.

Ok. There's not much point in reading your post any further.

One more time, then.

You have simply equated faith and trust in authority, then argued that every instance of trust in authority must thereby be an instance of faith.

A bullshit argument.

Faith involves trust but is not just trust. It includes something more. I've set this out in detail in my previous posts.

The mark of faith is that when challenged, one's commitment is not to be subject to reevaluation, but to be defended.

The mark of rationality and science is when challenged, not to simply defend, but reevaluating and reassessing one's commitment.

One last explanation before you go buy a sausage...


...and it might be useful for the foreigners to learn how a democracy does voting.

Put simply, those worlds in which LNC is contradicted are not possible worlds.

That ought confuse you even more...

In a world in which the LNC is contravened, anything goes.

Yep.

We should also keep clear the distinction between volition and physics. Giving an order involves volition, on the part of the order-giver and the order-follower; it is possible not to follow an order, and that sort of possibility is not a physical possibility.

So we have at least three sorts of implication - logical, volitive and physical.

And I dare claim only the first involves what might be called determinism.

If you think black holes do not exist, what do you do next?

Do you explain, predict, and revise, Investigate the objection, and use Assertive/testable claims? Then you are doing science.

DO you express loyalty, identity, hope, defend against the objection, and use declaratives, commissives, and performatives? Then that's not science.

Now go back and look at this:

I don't believe Banno or @Janus are even attempting to give a clear definition of what faith is. Instead, they are using notions without clarifying what the idea of it is that we should use for the discussion. I agree that anyone that believes faith is belief despite the evidence is deploying a straw man of theism: I am just not sure if they are even committing themselves to that definition. — Bob Ross

Which is it? What are the speech acts involved here? Science or faith?

Ok. Can you understand how from were I stand that looks insincere? I've given a substantive account of the nature of faith, over several posts and using a method that has a strong philosophical pedigree, and you simply refuse to engage with it.

Why should I bother to chat with you further?

Loooks to be two very different things. To get anywhere would have to show how T-sentences could be used here. And T-sentences do not make use of atomic sentences, but of translated sentences. The p in <"p" is true iff p> does not need to be atomic.

Think it's all too vague.

Seems from your style that you are not looking for critique but for converts.

All that's left is the perception that Man Strong Rapist Woman Weak Raped, and it works like a thought terminating cliche. — fdrake

Spot on.

Hence the very denial of the existence of transgender folk that impedes the understanding of the so many here. It's "beyond the pale"; it is incomprehensible and so is categorically denied.

And yet there are trans folk.

And the sea-battle's possibility will change, depending on whether we're looking forward or looking back. — J

That's an issue of accessibility, it seems to me. So the day before the battle might occur, the possible world in which it takes place and the possible world in which it does not take place are accessible. If it occurs, then the day after, only the possible world in which it did occur will be accessible.

Strictly logical modalities don't work this way; logical form doesn't occur in physical space/time at all. — J

Not following that. Seems I just showed this to be mistaken, by showing how logical modalities can be used to describer physical states.

Pretty simple. God's being loving and merciful is incompatible with his damning folk for eternity. Any retort is ad hoc sophistry.

Further, those who believe that damning folk for eternity is a good thing show questionable moral judgement.

Power back on, then?

I am wondering what you think faith means, — Bob Ross

I dunno, Bob. I've given you much more about what I think faith means than just a five word definition. I've also shown how faith is at its most apparent when challenged. But you seem discontent.

So one last time, faith involves trust, adherence to a belief, and commitment, and is shown most clearly when the faithful are under pressure.

If you can't work with that, then so be it.

It's pretty clear that "faith" doesn't apply to belief in science in the way you suppose it does.

Here's a nice tabulation from ChatGPT:


Seems pretty clear to me. There's a big difference in what one is doing, in each case.

Perhaps we have a beautifully apt demonstration of bad faith in Leon's posts. Bad faith is an insincere performative, the mere pretence of engaging in a discussion while not committing, shown by a failure to address the comments made by yourself, @Tom Storm, or I - a dishonest act from the start — a performance for show rather than a true binding.

Or is it just Leon collapsing under pressure? While true faith is confirmed under pressure, bad faith is exposed.

ChatGPT identified three "clusters" in the use of "faith": faith as trust in persons or things; faith as adherence to doctrines or beliefs; and faith as moral commitment or fidelity. There are grounds here to think that the theist and the atheist may be talking past each other if the theist is focused on faith as moral commitment or fidelity while the atheist focuses on adherence to doctrines or beliefs. Much of this thread might be seen as along these lines.

Authority is relevant to faith as adherence to doctrines or beliefs, but not so much to the two other clusters.

Another Austinian tool is to consider when a concept goes astray. Three infelicities for faith as trust in a person or thing are misplaced trust, hollow trust and pretend trust. For faith as adherence to doctrines or beliefs, we have false, shallow and divided faith. For faith as moral commitment or fidelity, we have broken faith, conditional faith and misapplied faith.

It offered the following tabulation:


I then asked about faith under duress. It replied that speech acts reveal their character most clearly when they are tested, and that "Keeping faith" under easy conditions tells us little; under duress, the act's full force or failure becomes visible. It then offered:

Austin might put it this way:
"The full import of the performative 'I have faith' is often only completed, or sometimes annulled, by later conduct under pressure." — ChatGPT

A couple of observations. Firstly that this is a fairy competent application of the sort of method Austin advocated for understanding concepts. But this sort of linguistic analysis is perhaps something at which one might expect an LLM to excel. Secondly, it's clear that "Faith proves itself — or reveals itself as fake — when it costs something." If we are looking for a way to differentiate faith form trust or belief or commitment, this must be at last part of it.

...but what do you take 'faith' to be? Do you not have a precise definition? — Bob Ross

I'll try again. Any "precise" definition of a complex term will miss some of that term's common uses. Hence, no such definition can capture the full use of the term.

Instead, we might map out the extent of the term, seeing what is usually included, what is excluded, and when and why. Think of this as mapping out the family resemblance involved, and as an empirical exercise, and certainly not some vague personal intuition.

Alternately, we might stipulate a definition, in which case others might stipulate a different definition, and no progress is made. And in addition, any stipulated definition will omit some of the uses to which the term is put, or leave itself open to counter-instances.

So in place of a definition, we might look for a map of the use of the term, which is what the ChatGPT exercise is a first go at. It is not a definition. Hence,

How does this help? Well, your account was that faith involves trust in an authority. If this were so, then we might expect to find "trust" and "authority" amongst the main words found. While "trust" is there, "authority" isn't. — Banno

I asked if "authority" occurs anywhere...

Yes, it occurred once — in the definition of teachings: "Ideas or principles taught by an authority."
So "authority" appeared, but only once, and not as a central term connected directly to faith itself — it was in the background of "teachings," which is itself only one aspect of the larger picture. — ChatGPT

While your definition may capture one aspect of faith, it does not exhaust the meaning of faith as such. "Trust" and "belief" can operate without explicit reference to an authority. It seems you are stipulating a typical case (e.g., religious faith) and treating it as the essence, while ordinary usage is broader and looser.

A bit of analysis on AUKUS from the Australian Institute of International Affairs - Built on "Hopes and Dreams" – AUKUS and the Future of Australian Foreign Policy

A deal made without consideration by parliament, mind you...

The AUKUS pact — between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States — was announced publicly in September 2021 by then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison. It involved major strategic commitments, including Australia acquiring nuclear-powered submarines, a significant shift in defense policy. There was no prior debate or vote in Parliament before the announcement. The deal was negotiated and agreed upon at the executive level (primarily within the Prime Minister’s Office, Department of Defence, and Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade). Australia's system (a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy) allows the executive considerable discretion in foreign affairs and defense treaties. Constitutionally, the government can enter international agreements without needing parliamentary approval beforehand — although subsequent aspects (like budget appropriations, military base changes, or enabling legislation) may require Parliament's involvement.
After the announcement, the AUKUS deal and its implications have been debated in Parliament and the media, but the original decision was executive-driven.

Now no one will back down. Classic escalation of commitment.

Temporal possible world semantics allows for multiple accessible futures, while scientific determinism implies only one fixed future. If determinism is true, branching futures misrepresent reality. One response is to treat "possible futures" epistemically—as reflecting our ignorance—not metaphysically, preserving the utility of branching models without denying determinism. Or, as argued earlier, determinism is false.

Well... :smirk:

Excellent.

A version for those of a more analytic persuasion, b y way of checking my understanding:

Reality always exceeds the concepts we apply to it, in such a way that no concept, however refined, can say all there is to say. Changing concepts doesn’t solve this, because any alternate concepts will also miss saying something... So we have to acknowledge this, accepting the messiness of the real world.

How we do that, remains to be seen.

Could you provide a specific example of future event not following the rules?
Using Aristotle's sea battle example: Either there will be a sea battle tomorrow or not. Today, it is possible that there will be a sea battle tomorrow or not. And thus, it is not impossible that there will be a sea battle tomorrow or not. To me, all three propositions obey the fundamental rules. — A Christian Philosophy

There are two possible worlds that are accessible from today. In one, the sea battle occurs. In the other, it doesn't.

In no possible world does the sea battle both occur and not occur.

So in no possible world is the law of excluded middle contravened.

Possible world semantics provides a formalisation of such questions that allows is to avoid the sorts of issues Aristotle and Quine feared. Logic moves on.

Yep

There is plenty of space for a richer rejoinder, along several lines. My attempt...

1. Faith is not believing without evidence so much as believing without conclusive proof. This is a common argument, along the lines of @Tom Storm's plane, somewhat downplayed. We do believe things without conclusive proof - arguably religious belief fits here.

2. Faith is a reasonable response to a sort of evidence that is different to the evidence seen in science. It's arguably a reasonable response to existential shock - the surprise that there is something rather than nothing; or to ethical problems, giving a reason for what one does with one's life.

3. Faith concerns trust and loyalty, rather than belief. More of what we do rather than what we think.


Something like that. There are counters to each, of course, and no doubt counters to those counters.

But that's not what we see here.

I pay attention to to Sky - for the amusement value.