By this I understand you to be saying that the symbols need to refer to something (or predicate something) in the world (or in a possible world if we are using possible world semantics). — NotAristotle

Roughly, yes. But it's freer than that. It's fine in a formal system to say things like "a" stands for a, perhaps in explaining what the " does in separating mention form use. The symbols do not have to denote actual-world entities.

So they can, but need not.

I was trying to draw a broad sharp line between those who support institutions even if they often suck and those who want to shake the Etch a Sketch upside down. I am not aware of any of the former kind who subscribe to the purely emotional view you propose to be a significant factor in political discourse. — Paine

Somewhere in between we have Popper's ad hoc social engineering, piecemeal improvement. Small, testable reforms, improving society step by step while avoiding catastrophic overreach.

But is that enough?

:wink:

So we have the supposed paradox of tolerance; that the left, in advocating "tolerance", is hypocritical in not tolerating the right - in not tolerating intolerance.

One way to view this is as confusing tolerance with acceptance. In this usage, to tolerate is roughly to refrain from using coercion, while to accept is to place the account in the domain of public discussion.

The left can coherently tolerate the more extreme views of those on the right without accepting them.

Why not accept them? Popper's response is well-known, even if the attribution might be lost. To accept intolerance is to undermine the broader ethic of tolerance. It's not hypocrisy but consistency. On this account intolerance might be tolerated, but certainly not accepted.

I think Kant was muddle din his talk of such things, his confidence misplaced. But that's a side issue here.

The choices between what is acceptable or not is worked out each day wherever we are. — Paine

...is much better.

It's not only the result of obeying a series of rules, although rules may have their place; it's not algorithmic — Banno

Kant was pretty confident he was up to speed about the correct rules. — Paine

Always with the Kant. Oh, well.

Being consistent is all very well, but it doesn't tell us what to do in every case. The central problem with rules is that they are incomplete; there is always something they do not cover.

I have no idea what AmadeusD means by me strawmanning myself. — unimportant

Don't lose sleep over it.

The choices between what is acceptable or not is worked out each day wherever we are. — Paine

Yep. It's not only the result of obeying a series of rules, although rules may have their place; it's not algorithmic. It's enacted. It's human.

That's were 's conclusion fits.

Hu?

I could go in to a analysis of the terms involved, but I don't think that will help. You are pleased to play with words, and I won't stand in your way. But what you say remains unclear.

3. If we take this representation, and make it a part of a structure of modal logic consisting of "possible worlds", and designate it "the actual world" amongst those possibilities, this so-called "actual world" is not consistent with the "actual world" of realism. It is as I've demonstrated, contradictory, because it is a human dependent representation rather than something independent. — Metaphysician Undercover

All you have done here is restate your thesis.

Tedious in the extreme.

That a model of gravity talks about the Earth does not entail that the Earth is human-dependent. That a modal modal talks about the actual world does not entail that the actual world is human dependent.

You continue to confused the metaphysical actual world with our representation of it inside a modal model. That confusion is the whole mistake, and repeating it does not amount to an argument.

The extensionality of mathematics is an illusion created by treating numbers and other so-called "mathematical objects" as extensional referents, when they are really intensional. — Metaphysician Undercover

What to make of this nonsense. Numbers are extensional, but you do not appear to have a firm grasp of what extensionality is. Extensionality in logic and in mathematics is simply defined in terms of substitution. Intensional contexts are those in which substitution fails. Extensionality is substitutivity of co-referential terms without changing truth. Numbers are extensional by this definition. Modal statements are intensional because substitution can change truth. Possible world semantics provdes an extensional model of this this intentionality. You conflates the two, which is the source of your confusion.

You have to tell me what you disagree with. — Hanover

But I don't think I do disagree...

It's just the way you said it.

One can't locate the morning star at night because it by definition is present only during the day. — Hanover

If night is the period before sunrise, then yes, you can. Look to the East. I'd allow Wittgenstein into the lab, in the hope of helping Pinker get his conceptual foundations in order.

Given your "By definition, the actual world is the one we are in", how is "The universe" in any way distinct from the form: "this world'? You label the latter indexical, but apparently deny that of the former. — noAxioms

Mixed domains. "Universe" is a metaphysical notion, while "world" is a logical notion. They do not have the same use. "Universe" is a term used by physicists for a particular physical structure. "World" is used by logicians, more or less for a group of consistent, true sentences - a use that probably comes from the Tractatus.

The term "semantics" is a question mark for me here because semantics has to do with meaning, right? So how does meaning factor into a formal logical system? — NotAristotle

Formal logic clearly differentiates semantics and syntax. At the core it's the difference between strings of letters in an accepted order and what those strings of letters stand for.

What follows is greatly simplified. The full story can be found in any introduction to logic.

So we can set out the whole of the syntax of predicate logic - the p's and q's - in a few brief rules.
1. We are allowed to write any letter p, q, r...
2. We can put a ~ in front of any thing we can write. So we can write ~p, ~q, and so on.
3. We can put a ^ between any two things we write. So we can write p ^ q, and we can write ~p ^ r
....and so on. If we stick to these rules we can't write things such as "p~^~".

A few simple rules like this sets out the syntax for propositional logic - the strings of letters that are allowed. These are called the well-formed formulae (WFFs). But it says nothing at all about the semantics, what those letters stand for. Thats the place of semantics. The p's and q's are taken to stand for sentences or propositions, the "^" stands for "and", the "~" for "not" and so on.

In predicate logic, we adopt the whole syntax of propositional logic, and add that were we write the p's and q's, we might write f(a) and g(a, b) and so on. This again is syntax, telling us only what we are allowed to write down, how the symbols used can be ordered, and nothing about what they stand for. We also include x, y, and so on as variable for individuals.

In predicate logic we give an interpretation by assigning individuals to the a's and b's. So "a" might stand for "NotAristotle" and "b" for "Australia" and so on. The process of giving an interpretation is more or less the process of constructing a model for the language. It's what determines what is true and what is false. So if we add that "g(x,y) is interpreted as "x is in y", then g(a,b) is just "NotAristotle is in Australia", and we have that g(a,b) will be true if and only if "NotAristotle is in Australia".

Again, note that syntax tells us what we can write, but not what is true and what is false. To decide what is true and what is false, we need a semantics, an interpretation of the symbols.

So we have the syntax, which is bunch of symbols and the rules for writing them. Then we have an interpretation, the rules for what those symbols stand for, in a given domain, a set of all the individuals. And together these make a model, a system that tells us which strings of letters are true and which are false. The model gives the truth values of the sentences or propositions of the language, the semantics of the formal language.

Uses for modal logic

In philosophy
In engineering

As I said, your interpretation is incorrect. The world we are in is not a possible world. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not my interpretation. It's the consequence of possible world semantics and the associated modal logic.

That's just you asserting, again, that ~(p→◇p), which is invalid in any system that is reflexive.

Again, if it is true, you cannot talk about the actual world within possible world semantics - which is just to put yourself at odds with the accepted logic.

Which I suppose, in your eccentricity, is what you are indeed doing.

One thing you have not demonstrated is that ~(p→◇p); you have simply assumed this. Indeed it's not the sort of thing that one can demonstrate.

In an attempt to be as charitable as possible, I fed your criteria into an AI and asked it to put together a coherent account. Here's what I got.

Logic
A non-reflexive modal logic (NRML)
Actual world not in the modal domain
No p → ◇p
No Fitch paradox
Modality applies only to counterfactual models, not reality

Metaphysics
Actual world is primitive, not one among possibilities
Possible worlds are conceptual constructions
No metaphysical modality, only hypothetical modelling
No essentialism or counterfactual identity

Semantics
Two-tier structure: reality vs. fictional modal space

What you have done is to deny that there can be systematic modal reasoning, without offering any clear alternative.

From a week ago...

I ignore you because you make so very many errors, that take time to explain; but also because even when the problem is explained, you habitually double down rather than correct yourself. Witness your views on acceleration and on 0.9999... and now on this, all display the same pattern. — Banno

What happened here is that you attempted a critique of modal logic without first getting an idea of how it works. When I attempt to set out how possible world semantics clarifies and explains the issues here, you jump to further unfounded criticisms rather than try to understand. that's the "doubling down".

So, going back, p→◇p is valid in S4 and S5, the systems almost universally used for metaphysical speculation. These systems are reflexive, meaning that they permit us to talk about the possible world we are in. Denying p→◇p, as you do, blocks that reflexivity.

Going back a bit further, if we allow p→◇p and so Kp→◇Kp, then Fitch shows that antirealism directly implies that there are no true statements that is not known.

The out for antirealism is to set aside classical logic.

And going right back to the OP and title, for an antirealist who accepts classical logic, there isn't anything to be known beyond what is known; which some might understand as that there isn’t anything beyond our reality. However that view is fraught with metaphysical and logical problems.

But when you stipulate an actual world, then the others are no longer (metaphysically) possible. — Metaphysician Undercover

No.

It really would help if you read some logic.

, , I suspect I don't disagree, which is most disagreeable. But I'm not confident that I understood what you said, so I may be wrong.

You do think so. — noAxioms

"The universe is not composed of true statements" contains no indexical expressions. It contains no indexical terms (no “I”, “here”, “now”, “actual”, “this world”, etc.).

"The actual world is the one we are in" is indexical. It contains "we".

...this particular universe is the actual one due to your presence in it — noAxioms

On this account, any possible world in which you exist would be an actual world.

This all seems a rather odd thing on which to focus.

That usage has both of us detecting the same public actual coffee. That usage is not a reference to the experience of the scent, only to the action of detection of the public substance. — noAxioms

Pretty much.

Can I sugest

Boxes and diamonds: An open introduction to Modal Logic
as a companion to this thread.

HTML at https://bd.openlogicproject.org/bd-screen.pdf

Here's the definition of extensionality, from p.205, Appendix A:

Definition A.1 (Extensionality). If A and B are sets, then A=B iff every element of A is also an element of B , and vice versa.

It's the rule that these are all, extensionally, the very same: {a, a, b }= {a, b }= {b, a}.

And if the item a is also called "Fred", the they are extensionally the same as {Fred, b}.

The main point here, unless I am misreading, appears to be that modal logic (logic that uses the necessarily and possibly operators) is intensional, not extensional. — NotAristotle

Better, that it was thought to be intensional, until Kripke. Read on.

if we assign to one of the possible worlds the status of "actual world" by realist principles... — Metaphysician Undercover

We are stipulating that that one world is the actual world, not deducing it. Any world can counted as w₀. It's built in, not contradictory. There is no modal difference between the actual world and other possible worlds. The difference is metaphysical, not modal.

No wonder I'm so confused — Metaphysician Undercover

You have yet to study modal logic, but insist on your opinion. That's why you are confused.

the world generally operates on US Eastern Standard Time. — Hanover

Not down here.

It's not a live chat. It's just a conversation like a regular ChatGPT page, but with the AI interjecting.

Since it violates the rules of the model for one of the possible worlds to be the actual world — Metaphysician Undercover

:roll:

It doesn't.

"Intersectionality", as it's called.

Central to both the social and critical models of disability, but external to the medical model.

Fine. Bear in mind that what I said here is in response to a request. In my opinion, the social security system in the US is appalling.

I can go in to the deficiencies of the US social security system in more detail, if that's where you want to go. That's usually seen negatively, as bashing America, and would be a bit off-topic, but happy to do so if it serves some purpose.

All of which is not to say that our system is ideal. Far from it.

Cool. — frank

Yeah, not so much. Leaves me pretty cold, really. :grimace:

These are people she has met personally.

And yes, we have also been involved in exposing scams.

You're such a compassionate person Banno. — frank

Come on, you know me better. Not I, Wife.

I'm not posturing, I'm pointing to a problem. And you did ask.

How would you say it stacks up to the USA's? — Moliere

We've sent aid packages to folk we know in the US who have not been able to get the support they need.

Yeah, I know. Shocking.

Everyone I've ever met who was living "on disability" (receiving SSI payments) was doing pretty well. — frank

Not what we see, on various international forums for folk with disabilities. The situation is pretty dire.

And you have a president who openly mocks disability.


Hey, you guys asked.

None of the possible worlds could be the actual world, as that would constitute an invalid difference, within the collection of possible worlds, one would be the actual world. — Metaphysician Undercover

Risible.

One of the possible worlds is the actual world.

Either that, or the actual world is not possible.

I've always seen it as a way of re-framing the debate in analytical terms — Wayfarer

Analytic philosophy is a broad church.

But that last paragaph is somewhat ambiguous. You see qualia as a way of undermining Chalmers? But for him the “hard problem” relies on the reality/cogency of qualia.

I keep seeing "right winger" as "right whinger".

There's something very deep in that.

It is like saying 'you are intolerant because you do not tolerate racism' — unimportant

Yep.

Tolerance is often insufficient. It will not do to simply tolerate divergence while still despising it. The further step is to accept divergence. We accept multiculturalism, LGBQTI+, disability and so on as aspects of human variation. Racism, we don't accept, but tolerate; that is, we refrain from denying them civil rights or using coercion against them so long as they abide by the law. This is quite different from accepting racism itself. Acceptance applies to people’s identities, capacities, and ways of life; tolerance applies, in limited fashion, to people whose doctrines we reject.

The grammar of tolerance and acceptance is context-dependent. Acceptance cannot apply to doctrines that deny the very conditions for ethical coexistence. Coherent belief revision requires distinguishing between beliefs about human variation (to accept) and beliefs about harmful ideologies (to interpret but not accept).

The left doesn’t conflate tolerance and acceptance; it simply applies each concept to its appropriate domain. Flattening them into a single “more vs. less tolerant” scale misses the ethical point.

So for some p, the possibility of p ends when p occurs and for other p it doesn't. Furthermore, the ending of the possibility of my winning the Kentucky Derby 2025 does not depend on whether I win or lose or even take part. It depends only the the race happening. The disappearance of this specific p depends only on the date, not on whether I win or not. — Ludwig V

Yep. This is formalised by accessibility relations. metaphysically, before the race is run, both the worlds in which you win and those in which you do not are accessible; any might become the actual world. After you win, only the worlds in which you win are accessible. Semantically, both before and after the race is won, we can access both the worlds in which you won and those in which you did not.

Conflating these is the exact error Meta repeatedly makes.

What you are describing is not conceptual ambiguity, but rather epistemic ambiguity. — hypericin

I don't think so. Rather what you see as epistemic - an inability to know if someone is conscious - is the result of thinking about a family of related notions as if they were a single notion.

It's a mistake to think of consciousness only in terms of having a particular object, some private quale. The very idea of a private definition of consciousness is a philosophical artefact born of misusing words like “experience” and “inner” together with a misguided notion of essential characteristics. A picture that holds us enthralled.

Now I think I've demonstrated that, over the last page or so. I don't see that there is an account of qualia that can hold it's own.

None of what I've said here is to claim that we are not conscious. That's a common error hereabouts. What is shown is the poverty of adopting only one account, the possession of quale, as the arbiter of consciousness.

Thanks for doing your homework... :wink:

For what it's wort, the NDIS here differentiates disability/impairment on the one hand form medical issues on the other, using the following criteria:

1. A disability is permanent.
2. A disability involves a substantial reduction in functional capacity.
3. A disability must affect a person’s ability to work, study, or take part in social life, and they must likely need long-term supports.

The impairment must be functional and permanent and require support. That's very much following the medical model. It reinforces the deficit model, framing disability as a problem for an individual body, not as a disjunction between that body and its environment. It presumes the evaluative place of a "normal" body, an unquestioned baseline. It arbitrarily rejects chronic illness, which would otherwise count as a disability. It ignores lived experience of fluctuating or episodic disability.

Now my advocacy has been towards a capabilities focus, looking at the valued human capabilities that are restricted, and what supports enable the person to actually realise them. In this framing consideration of the impairment is replaced by consideration of what supports are needed to allow the person to achieve their capabilities. "assistance with daily living" and "mobility supports" changes to "self-care" and "social participation".

This approach has wide recognition, and underpinned the initial vision of the NDIS, but met opposition in the implementation, the bean-counters not being familiar with capabilities-based metrics. The dynamic between medical and social models is ongoing.

Given that dynamic, considerations involving critical theory are a long way from the centre of the discussion.

If you take a set of possible worlds, and apply some realist principles to deduce "the actual world"... — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, again, again, That's not what is being proposed. Any of the possible worlds could be the actual world - hence, "there is no modal difference between the actual world and the other possible worlds". Modal theory does not tell us which possible world is actual.

Your presumption that it does is exactly your confusing the modal and the metaphysical, your denial of p→◇p.

This is a pretty tedious conversation. You make the very same error, repeatedly. The actual world is one of the possible worlds. If you deny this, you must also deny reflexivity, which is to say you deny that we can talk about the actual world. You restrict yourself to quite simplistic and unusable modal systems.

All of which was set out formally, last week, and remains unaddressed.

But it's helping my post count. So carry on.

So we accept a poor definition over contemplating that consciousness is an ambivalent notion?

In first aid we are taught to test to see if someone is unconscious by asking for a response - "can you hear me? Open your eyes! What's your name? Squeeze my hand!". Some folk tend to forget this sort of thing doesn't apply to jellyfish and rocks.

In extremis, people may be conscious but unresponsive, which has led to a body of work looking for "no-report" tests for consciousness. One suggestion is that medical folk look for the "neural correlate of consciousness", which face the problem of how to establish conscious experience without first-person evidence. No-report paradigms rely on eye-movement, neuro-imaging, or physiological measures as indicators of consciousness. The trouble with no-report approaches is that they tend to diagnose cases of consciousness as cases of unconsciousness, the “bored monkey” problem, in which a monkey appears unconscious because it fails to follow the red dot, when it's just bored. Perhaps the panpsychists are right, and we are attributing unconsciousness ot rocks that are simply bored.

At the other extreme, would it make sense to insist that someone was unconscious, despite their protests to the contrary?

Is it that we have not yet found a clean and clear definition of consciousness, or is it that consciousness is not one thing, with a clean and clear definition?

Should we shoehorn consciousness into a definition, or learn to work with a level of ambiguity?

That's true. But the fact that the existence of the statement that Mount Everest is 29,000 ft high depends on human beings, does not show that the existence of Mount Everest depends on human beings at all. De re and de dicto. — Ludwig V

Thank you.

The semantic model does not commit us to the existence of its content. But if the actual world is affirmed to be a part of that semantic model, as you and others here continue to insist, then this is contrary to realism which assumes that the actual world is independent from any semantic model. — Metaphysician Undercover

As if we could not talk about the actual world.

You can't have it both ways, assert that the actual world is a part of a semantic model, with no claims to existence, and also assert that there is a real independent, existing actual world. — Metaphysician Undercover

Because, as explained many times, it's not the semantic model that shows which possible world is actual.

But you cannot see this. That's about you, I suppose.

A bit of a stretch, maybe. But there is a respect for persons in, say Nussbaum and Witt, both classists, that is not found in what passes for Aristotelianism in the forum; and there might be some overlap. Witt is pretty wild in some regards.







That second tension, the deconstruction of normativity, is something I have time for, and outside of Aristotelian thinking.