I will be treated as a social outcast, with whom no one wants to be associated with. So therefore, this is necessarily intolerant towards me, since it acts as a way to marginalise me. — Agustino

So you think people should be required to socialize with you even if they can't stand your views? I think people should be free to socialize with whomever they want.

Well, it's inevitable for some people to be better than others. — Agustino

Better than others in what way, though? Athletically, intellectually, better at making money, better at exploiting and manipulating, being more beautiful, being the right skin color, being born to the right family, etc? How are you going to define the criteria for who is better?

Who do you think deserves to be considered better?

Being treated equally means that you can express your opinion freely without legal consequence. Some people might not like you for that, but they are free to dislike you or to challenge your opinion. You're not being oppressed just because you end up with a minority opinion that most people dislike.

Who are you to claim so? — darthbarracuda

I don't think a coherent philosophical argument can be made for the objective existence of inherent rights. The best anyone can do is invoke God, and that will only get you as far as people believe in God. And even then, God doesn't seem to bother to enforce those rights, so ...

However, I disagree that these are fundamental values and intrinsic rights. — Agustino

There isn't any such thing, except as we decide there are intrinsic rights. My opinion is that deciding there are makes for a better world for everyone in it, so we might as well act like there is such a thing.

He just has strong opinions, particularly when it comes to politics, and calling him a "Commie", even in jest, is a conservative meme that will be seen as a battle cry.

This well end well. *Pulls up chair, waits on Landru to join discussion.*

No -- time doesn't rack up either. We live within a moment. — The Great Whatever

So what the hell does it mean to live well then? We might live moment by moment, but we're constantly thinking about the past and the future, and we make choices based on that.

It should be obvious, but some ethicists do treat life as if it had a scoreboard, which is the only thing I can see that would make the notion of 'maximization' make sense here. — The Great Whatever

What I was thinking with the OPs question is that, if one is a hedonist, how might one go about having as much pleasure as they can with as little suffering? And of course there is a time element involved, where the hedonist is planning on how they might make choices or structure their life to accomplish that. It's not about keeping score, although it certainly helps to have more pleasurable memories. There is also a satisfaction with life element. The happy hedonist planned well and maximized their opportunities for pleasures while minimizing pain (perhaps in the form of negative consequences). They can feel good about that.

So for example, a hedonist might ask themselves if habitual drug use will bring them the most enjoyment, but then they might calculate that the negative consequences would make it not worth becoming addicted.

Apparently you find it difficult to make that distinction. I kind of feel sorry for you that you are unable to commit to an emancipatory view of the world, and are stuck on some abstract rules of debate as if politics were a game. — Landru Guide Us

I just think the kind of rhetoric you're using is very divisive. The other side using the same tactic. The result is to polarize people. But hey, if it wins elections, right?

The narrative here is that the US is in the thrall of NRA paranoid gun nuts who hate democratic values, not to mention minorities, women, workers, etc. It happens to be true, but that's besides the point. The point is to never mention guns without this frame. — Landru Guide Us

Jesus man, this is not promoting a healthy democracy. I get it that the other side decided to play mean and dirty in their interest of power, but this kind of framing doesn't help. It divides people. It polarizes. The problem with your average conservative is that they hear too much of that crap on their radio and TVs. Then they end up thinking liberals are their enemies, and an evil amongst them that needs to be dealt with somehow. That goes nowhere good.

Are you arguing that the exploitative, boorish, knownothing positions of conservatism aren't evil, or are you arguing we're not allowed to call it that? — Landru Guide Us

No, I'm arguing that you call them that for the same reason conservatives call you evil.

The sanitized NRA version of a militias being citizen soldiers is pure historical dreck. The 2nd Amendment was about one thing - southern slave owners killing and exploiting blacks. Your narrative is nonsense. — Landru Guide Us

Ah, so a controversial issue and it's entire history can be boiled down to just one thing.

The best scholarship shows that — Landru Guide Us

By best, you mean the scholarship that boils it down to one thing.

Energy use is expected to double by 2050, so renewables would have to do more than replace the current demand. They would also have to meet the demand of the developing world plus adding 2-3 more billion people.

Excoriating evil in words is good for the soul and the first step in defeating it in practice. — Landru Guide Us

And it's also good for making the opposition look bad. If we're on the side of righteousness and those evil, selfish, greedy bastards are out to drink our children's blood, well then, we don't need to bother with their side of the matter. We can just dismiss it.

How issues are framed determines how they get argued. — Landru Guide Us

Yes, indeed it does. As is so often the case with controversial issues. So let's frame it as good guys vs bad guys.

The gun issue should be framed as the freaks and fetishists against rational normal Americans who want to go about their business without worrying a gun nut will shoot them. — Landru Guide Us

Not, it should be framed as people have a different understanding of the second amendment, which has to be balanced with what to do about the problem of gun violence.

The second amendment guarantees the right to bear arms only in the context of a well regulated militia. — Thorongil

Does it? How has the Supreme Court and constitutional scholars traditionally understood the issue? You make it sound like it was well understood to just be in the context of maintaining a well regulated militia, until the most recent court. But individuals have retained the right to own guns long after the US had an official military.

It is useful, and I was wondering how universals might play a role in the debate over scientific realism. It sounds like Kantianism is a strong version of conceptualism. I wonder if scientific realism requires universals or tropes to be part of the world. Does the issue ultimately go back to how we are able to make sense of the flux of experience?

I understand that you accept that facts, and that theories have to be formulated by minds. Nevertheless, the theories that have been formulated state there is this deep time before us. I take that to mean evolution is true in that it really happened, as opposed to it just appears to happen to creatures like us with our particular senses and cognitive abilities.

Furthermore, you're posing a false dichotomy between Kant and science - the Critique of Pure Reason is not creationism or religious dogma. Kant was an empirical realist, he wasn't trying to undermine science. — Wayfarer

I'm not saying he wasn't, but you stated that the view from nowhere is impossible for us, and yet science posits deep time in which there were no human minds. And what happened during this deep time is what led to human minds being able to connect axioms about that past. You also stated that the world outside of us is unknowable, but again science has quite a lot to say about this unknowableness. We weren't there in the Big Bang or when life first got going, but yet science says that's what's crucially important to us being here in the first place.

You have to bracket all that and add the caveat, as it appears to us. Or as it is correlated to us. Which is odd, because it appears to us that there was all this stuff happening without us, and most crucially, we wouldn't be around if not for all that. But if philosophically we can't say what the world is like without us, then those scientific theories are prima facie wrong without caveating them. It only appears to scientists that our existence depends on Evolution, etc.

Are you trying to say that people who disagree with your position are evil?

Well, I can almost always be having more pleasure or pain than I currently am. So I don't understand what hedonism is supposed to accomplish ethically. What, am I not to figure out how to have more pleasure and less pain?

Well... it is anti-scientific for starters — TheWillowOfDarkness

If it's anti-scientific, then why do scientists posit such things? If you don't think they do, then go ask a physicists if GR or QM applies to the entire universe. Go ask a biologist if evolution applies to all life. The topology of the universe itself is said to be determined by gravity, for Plato's sake.

It's also terrible with respect to interactions betweens humans. Since it is an essentialist position, it has us thinking we know the "nature" people without taking a moment to consider them and their relationship to our theories and actions. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Well, there must be something about humans which differentiates us from duckbill platypuses or peat moss. That people have gotten all worked up about what exactly that is and done terrible things doesn't change the fact that we're not dogs.

But if the OP means that anybody who votes for a conservative is complicit in the death culture of America's advanced capitalist danse macabre, I'll agree to that. — Landru Guide Us

What good does making statements like that do except preach to the choir?

For that matter, what good does it do to state that Americans like murder when there are other possibilities, such as Americans think the 2nd Amendment is important and understand it a certain way? There's lots of things in modern life we accept as necessary despite the negative consequences, such as driving cars. That's because we think cars outweigh the disadvantage of pollution and deaths or injury from accidents. Similarly, enough Americans, or at least those who care about the issue, think that the right to own guns outweighs the terrible tragedies when certain individuals get their hands on guns and shoot up the place.

You might disagree with valuing a right Americans have considered fundamental since our founding, perhaps because your country does not, and that's fine, but to say that we like murder is a complete mischaracterization. At any rate, you're only rallying your own troops, who already agree with you. It has negative impact on the opposition. Not a single gun owner will be persuaded otherwise by being told they like murder.

What makes it disgusting? GR and QM are said to apply to the entire cosmos. It is an inference that can be shown incorrect, but the problem of universals is that we so readily universalize over particulars.

Then accept the reality of universals. Many particulars really do have things in common. It's empirically evident. X and Y are both (correctly) described as having a negative charge or being circle. It's still not clear to my what the problem is. — Michael

I tried to explain, but it's been considered a problem in philosophy since the Ancient Greeks.

We say that it's true for the entire cosmos, and if it successfully describes and predicts all relevant phenomena then it is and if it doesn't then it isn't. — Michael

It's not a problem if one accepts the reality of universals. It is if one doesn't. Then you need to account for laws of nature some other way. To say that it just fits observation is to ignore the problem, which is to account for the existence of such principles.

I don't understand. We do it by doing it. We say "gravity is inversely proportional to distance squared for all objects having mass" and then if this statement successfully describes (and predicts) every experiment then we say that it is true. — Michael

Yes, but it's saying more than that. It's saying that it's true for the entire cosmos, which is impossible to test. We have an expectation that when we come across new stars or galaxies, the same principle will apply. That's what makes it universal.

But just as we don't then conclude that universities aren't real we shouldn't then conclude that universals aren't real. — Michael

Well, Some philosophers don't think that universities are real.

What you should ask is "is X a real universal?" And if X is something that many particulars have in common then X is a real universal. It is an empirical fact that many particulars have things in common (shape, size, colour, etc.) and so it is an empirical fact that these things (shape, size, colour, etc.) are real universals. — Michael

Does this imply a kind of strong emergence for universals then? Could you have predicted the existence of universities from their parts before there were any universities?

This sounds like essentialism, and as I argued here, essentialism doesn't really work. — Michael

Universals and essentialism seem related. If you accept that universals are real, can you still deny essentialism? You are agreeing that it's true that things in common share the same properties.

The contradiction comes from stating that we can't get outside our perspective to say what the world is like without us, and yet very important and successful scientific theories do exactly that.

You seem to be working on the premise that it's less problematic for each individual particular to behave in its own unique manner. But what warrants this premise? — Michael

I may have made a mistake here in my characterization of the problem. It's not just that particulars have similarities. It's that we universalize over all potential particulars to say things like gravity is inversely proportional to distance squared for all objects having mass. But of course we don't experience all matter, so how are we able to do that?

Or we can say that all apples have the properties X, Y, Z without ever experiencing all apples. That's different from taking 100 apples and lumping them in a category of similar traits. And yet we have a great deal of confidence that certain properties make an apple an apple, which differentiate it from non-apples.

Lakoff and Johnson would say so. In their Philosophy in the Flesh book, they traced Plato's forms to utilization of the kind metaphor. I don't think they gave his work the proper treatment, as they were in kind of a rush to characterize all of western philosophy as being built on top of various metaphors.

The question is whether making universals out to be metaphors dispenses with the issue, and what sort of implications that has for scientific theories. Is GR with it's curved spacetime metaphorical? They seemed to think so.

Well, no, because I reject realist ontology. If, however, you want a realist ontology, and if universals are inconsistent with a realist ontology, and if universals are apparent, then clearly realist ontology fails. — Michael

Realism in this debate means there are universals in addition to particulars, either in the particulars themselves, or some other realm. Maybe there are other options, but the point is they exist somewhere outside of our thoughts and language.

But earlier you said that we experience similarities and that universals are similarities. Therefore we experience universals. — Michael

I stated that universals are an explanation for similarities, and that if one wishes to dispense with universals, then particulars must play the role of explaining similarities.

Well, that's not true. We do know about universals. — Michael

We know that we utilize universals in language. Whether they exist in the world somehow in addition to the particulars is the age-old debate.

I don't know what you mean by this. Just that two particulars in different locations each behave in the same way? Yes. But, again, what's strange about this? — Michael

No, it's rather that there is something else called a universal by which the two particulars share properties or relations.

t is of course something of an oddity that scientific terms can shift in meaning quite a lot over time. 'Electron' is not what it was in Rutherford's day. 'Gene' is quite a different thing from when Dawkins wrote 'The selfish gene'. 'Species' is quite an uncertain beast. But perhaps that's my own hobby-horse and not this thread's — mcdoodle

There is that. I recall reading where some physicists have speculated that the fundamental constants vary over time. But I don't know if there is any empirical evidence for this so far.

There are no non-unique features. Any feature of a state of existence, by definition, is of that state only, including in instances where a feature is similar to what is found in some other particular. — TheWillowOfDarkness

If that's the case, then how does our universalizing work at all? How is it that we can categorize anything, or notice relationships between any particulars? In a universe of 100% unique particulars, generalization is impossible.

Unless you want to argue that the mind imposes a structure on the world which doesn't exist. That we're the ones adding the similarities in. I suppose that's what conceptualism amounts to.

I would dispute this. A trope theorist would argue that the attributes that are shared are actually just particulars that are part of a set. — darthbarracuda

Maybe so? If tropes can do the work, then there is no need for universals in one's philosophy. The question is can they? I take it that's an ongoing debate.

One issue for tropes is that they are themselves strange. The notion of abstract particulars is bound to draw similar stares of disbelief as universals do.

I don't understand the problem. You say that "we experience a world of particulars" but also that "we ... experience similarities". So if particulars aren't problematic then why are similarities? We experience them both. — Michael

It is accounting for the similarities that is problematic. We experience similarities among particulars. How is that? What is going on?

How are they hard to accommodate? We describe the structure and behaviour of two particular things using (more or less) the same sentence. What's strange about this? — Michael

For one thing, that universals are not bound to any single location. And for another, that particulars somehow participate in, or share properties with the universals. And finally, that universals are not epistemic. We experience particulars, not the universals themselves. Although maybe an Aristotelian can clarify their position here.

Perhaps; if you wish to keep universals our of our ontology. But why do you wish to do this? What, exactly, is the problem with saying that we use the single word "triangle" to describe the shape of two different particular things? — Michael

You're the one who has been challenging realism about universals in this thread, which would mean to keep them out of one's ontology. I was just explaining what that amounts to. If there are no universals, then particulars must do the work instead. That's all.

To put the problem as simply as possible, particulars are particulars because they are unique. And yet these unique particulars seem to have attributes which are not unique. It is those non-unique attributes which allows us to generalize. What needs explaining is how unique particulars appear to have non-unique features.

Seems to me universals are not needed at all. To understand a similarity between states, what we need to know is that those particulars share a certain expression of meaning. We predicate across particulars by knowing the particulars in comparison to each other, not by finding some form which exists regardless of particulars. — TheWillowOfDarkness

The problem is that we're able to successfully compare particulars. If all there are is particulars in the world, then where does the comparison come from? You mentioned two objects being red. How is it that they are both red? Sure, you can give a scientific account involving electrons and photons, but then you are just moving the problem to subatomic particles, which share the same properties.

If there are no universals, we still have particulars resembling each other. What are to make of these commonalities, resemblances, similarities? Something needs to take the place of universals to explain that.

So in that sense, the world isn't 'mind-independent'. Even if we imagine the world going on in our absence, or in the absence of the whole human species, that 'going on' is still imagined from an implicitly human perspective. Belief in the 'view from nowhere' is 'transcendental realism' - the construction of an idea of a universe with no observers in it. But I'm saying, it is literally impossible to conceive of such a world, because even to conceive of it requires an implicit perspective. — Wayfarer

Even though Kantians make a strong argument, the big problem with it is that our best scientific theories say something very different. They describe a deep time before us, leading up to us. Our very existence is explained by cosmology, astronomy, geology and evolution. If that's just from our human perspective, then our scientific theories are making false claims. They have to be uttered with a huge caveat. There were dinosaurs long before people, or so it appears to us living now.

I tend to fancy realism, particularly scientific realism, so that sort of thing really bothers me. I'm not interested in how the world appears to humans living now. I'm interested in how it is. If we can't get beyond our perspective, then what's the point in having theories of evolution or cosmology?

Because a neutrino is defined as that which is described using predicates X, Y, and Z. Your question is comparable to asking "why are all bachelors described as unmarried men?". — Michael

The essential problem of universals is that we experience a world of particulars, yet our language is full of properties, relations, and kinds. That's because we also experience similarities among the particulars, allowing us to generate taxonomies, distill patterns, create models, and so on. If there were no similarities, we could not universalize.

Stating that neutrinos are defined as having certain predicates is to miss the problem, which is how we can predicate across particulars. What needs to be explained is the similarities between particulars. Universals play this role well, but they do so at the cost of being strange and hard to accommodate, particularly in their more extreme forms.

If we wish to keep universals out of our ontology, then particulars must fill the role that universals play in our language. We should be able to replace all talk of universals with particulars, and leave nothing out. So particulars must be able to explain the similarities we notice amongst them. Noting that we can categorize particulars because we're able to assign predicates to them is to entirely miss the point. We already knew that. That's where the problem begins.