Two different ships can have the same model, have material bound the same way, function the same way, and yet they are two different ships, not the same ship, so that doesn't work. — Michael

One version of the puzzle has another ship being built out of the original bits, the ones that have been replaced, so that you now have two, and the question is, which one is the "real" one?

was Jacob the same person after he was named Israel — Hanover

There’s certainly a sense in which I’m not the same person I was 20 years ago. I’ve grown and changed as a person — Michael

But, consider the caterpillar. — Hanover

Peter van Inwagen, if I recall correctly, proposed (in Material Beings) the idea that only living things have an identity. Since the ship has no identity, there's no right answer, just social convention or whatever. I am the same person who read the book years ago, despite few of its details remaining accessible to me in memory.

Which is the main point I'm making on this thread: that realism vs anti-realism is the same issue as direction of fit; and that consequently it's a question of monitoring direction of fit rather than ontology. — Banno

I actually stumbled into the same thing here:

Even in ancient Athens, we might abstract over temples, markets, homes, and so on, to come up with something we call a "building". For all I know, there's a dialogue where Socrates does exactly this (right before showing that every proposed definition of "building" fails).

The world we live in now has buildings because we have made it so: we now deliberately make buildings suitable for a variety of purposes.

We could look at ancient Athens, employ our abstraction, and say that there are buildings there; but those are not buildings in the same way that our buildings are buildings, are they? — Srap Tasmaner

That's direction of fit, but it occurred to me in a slightly different form, our ability to intentionally realize abstractions. (It's almost too obvious that you could start here at architecture and proceed to an examination of constructivism.)

And again here:

There are two answers here: (1) it is righteous to intend that reality restrict what you say about it in just the way it restricts what you can do; (2) what we say we do not say in isolation, unconnected to what else we say and do, so if you claim your time at the gym has really been paying off and you could lift my car over your head with ease, it's natural for me to say, "Prove it." At that point, I let reality do the talking for me. — Srap Tasmaner

The two options are distinguished by direction of fit.

I've hardly talked about anything else. You're welcome.

I don't see how that follows. — Banno

There's actually a proxy for The One Thing to hand: the unceasing flow of sensory data. And sure enough, people who start there, who in some sense consider that the realest of reals, are inclined to say that what you take to be an individual object is a fiction, that sentences like "My coffee cup is on the nightstand" aren't literally about coffee cups and nightstands but about artifacts of the model we build based on the flow of sensory data, and thus not literally true. Maybe it makes a difference that something is theorized to be "out there" causing the flow of data, but maybe it doesn't.

Hanover's belief about whether the time at the gym has paid off affects his car-lifting abilities. External reality's not so strict an arbiter as you might like it to be here. — Isaac

My little car weighs about 1100 kg. The current world record for a clean and jerk is 166 kg.

how does reality restrict anything we do, perceive, or believe? We can say it does, but exactly how? How does the noumenal affect the phenomenal? — Hanover

Reality obviously restricts what we can do. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you.

But talk is cheap, no question, and people can say anything they like.

There are two answers here: (1) it is righteous to intend that reality restrict what you say about it in just the way it restricts what you can do; (2) what we say we do not say in isolation, unconnected to what else we say and do, so if you claim your time at the gym has really been paying off and you could lift my car over your head with ease, it's natural for me to say, "Prove it." At that point, I let reality do the talking for me.

And what of truth? If realism is worth talking about, it's the idea that some of the things we say about some of the things in the world are true in virtue of those things being what they are. You have us

choose to grab an arbitrary bunch of that stuff and call it X — Hanover

and then assign X to categories (which aren't things in the world) based on some criteria, and we

choose those criteria for whatever purposes we have — Hanover

So truth is only --- not even "also" but "only" --- a matter of our choices.

That's not much of a realism. It looks like idealism + "Oh yeah, and there's some stuff, I guess."

I'd say there are things and there are categories. Pluto was a planet, then it was not, but it was always there. All sorts of criteria must be met for us to call Pluto a planet and we can choose those criteria for whatever purposes we have, but Pluto remains regardless of what we call it and regardless of what category we assign it. That I take to be the fundamental tenant of realism. There is an independent substance sustaining the thing; otherwise the thing exists as a pure construct of our imagination. — Hanover

I think there is a concern remaining, even for so minimal a realism as this, that we are not justified in assuming that there are many things to classify. If we impose individuation just as we impose categories, then Pluto is not a thing at all, but part of a thing, the one thing. We split up the world into so-called objects, on such a view, and thus all statements that presuppose there being multiple objects are strictly false, just a manner of speaking.

Here's another question.

If you are a hobo, you might find a decrepit old barn and use it, temporarily, as a house.

If you are a wealthy couple on This Old House, you might spend half a million dollars to turn an old barn into a house.

Are those the same thing? Is one or the other "really" a house?

A building is "bad" if it does not fulfill its purpose, contextualized to the needs of the person building the building. The key here is that the "bad" judgment of the building is relative entirely upon human needs. — Hanover

Even in ancient Athens, we might abstract over temples, markets, homes, and so on, to come up with something we call a "building". For all I know, there's a dialogue where Socrates does exactly this (right before showing that every proposed definition of "building" fails).

The world we live in now has buildings because we have made it so: we now deliberately make buildings suitable for a variety of purposes.

We could look at ancient Athens, employ our abstraction, and say that there are buildings there; but those are not buildings in the same way that our buildings are buildings, are they?

If a poorly constructed building fails to meet certain criteria, we call it bad. We decide for ourselves what those criteria are depending upon the utility we seek from the building. There are no objectively good or bad buildings. It's just a matter of preference. On the other hand, the building itself exists regardless of my preference or opinion. — Hanover

I don't know much of anything about the history of architecture, but I suspect there were no "buildings" in ancient Athens, perhaps not even before the 20th century. Instead, there were temples, markets, homes, and so on. The idea of a "building" seems to be a function of our modern, industrial, impermanent man-made environment, in which buildings are easily repurposed or torn down and replaced. Many years ago, Stewart Brand wrote a book called How Buildings Learn; here's the first sentence of the Wikipedia summary:

Brand asserts that the best buildings are made from low-cost, standard designs that people are familiar with, and easy to modify. — W

He's offering a sort of "meta" definition of "best" as modifiable, not as fit for some purpose, but fit for, if not quite any, then certainly many purposes.

We have here an economic model that is agnostic about utilities and preferences, as it needs to be to accommodate the great variety of human beings. Our recognition of that variety does separate us from ancient cultures and from smaller, homogeneous societies. But at the same time, that model seems to leave utilities and preferences completely unmoored. That is, we are all expected to think of ourselves as the temporary vessel of some preferences, we are each of us an "anyone" of the model, and just happen to be this anyone. As any one person might have different preferences from any other, so we might have different preferences, and value utilities accordingly, from moment to moment.

We think of ourselves like the building, maybe a church today and condos tomorrow. Whatever we believe and whatever we care about, is only what we happen to believe and happen to care about at the moment. Is it any wonder that we require convoluted justifications for saying anything -- any belief or value, any utility or preference -- is better than anything else?

We can accept that we will have classes without reifying what any of them currently happen to be. — Isaac

One thing I'm sure we agree about is that it's helpful in any number of ways to recognize that you can classify objects in different ways. (I don't know that refusing to reclassify is reifying, but it's at least ossifying.)

We can learn to work through models consciously that were previously managed sub-consciously. The way we do this is by changing our concepts about how these models work, about the veracity of the results they produce. — Isaac

I'm obviously on-board with this to some degree, but I'm not sure that what we clumsily call the "belief" that there are "external objects" is up to us, no matter how much physicists futz with the definition of "object". Ditto for space, time, who knows what else.

I can do a crappy version of this. Suppose, as we might be doing in this thread, we want to talk about which classes of objects are instantiated (or non-empty, if you think of sets) and which are not. Maybe there are some classes that are invalid and cannot be instantiated. If they're all empty or invalid, because there are no objects, we can go up a level and say the class of instantiated classes is not instantiated (or empty). (And if we want, we can make this "object classes" or something, classes for which the instance would be an object, not another class .)

What interests me about this is not that we might be able to generate a contradiction or a paradox by constructing some peculiar class, something you'd only think of when doing this kind of analysis; what interests me is that even if we agree that the whole idea of a class turns out to be kind of useless, since there aren't any objects for them to be classes of, we can keep talking in terms of classes, and apparently keep making sense. Whether we could give up classes -- I doubt that can be made sense of, but maybe there's a sort of Funes-the-Memorius way of individualizing absolutely everything. At any rate, it looks like no matter how we undermine them, classes will still hang around cheerfully offering their services. ("Won't be needing you today, or ever -- you're not real, you're just a manner of speaking." "I'll just wait over here, then, shall I? In case you change your mind.")

And it's no use worrying about the ascent, making a rule against treating classes as objects. The only one I made was another empty one. You could reasonably claim that I'm implicitly talking about the class of classes, and it's not empty, but that just puts them back to work, and the whole idea was to see if we could get rid of them. It looks like we can't.

All of that to say that there seem to be features of our modeling that are not up to us. We know what it's like to be looking at data without realizing it's been filtered, then remove the filter and see what we'd been leaving out. We have no idea what it's like not to think in terms of objects and classes. (And probably space, time, causality, all the usual Kantian business.)

Here's what bothers me about the "something" business. You're still classifying, but refusing to name the classes you're using. Making them anonymous is pointless, and a maybe little disingenuous. (You can kind of kid yourself that you're keeping the model you're using at arm's length.) On the one hand, it's as if it's only the name, not the classifying, that we're worried about; on the other, the name plays a role, and we ought to look at that.

I'm not arguing for incommensurability; I'm just saying that between data and questions of fact there's theory.

How many planets are in our solar system?

As Davidson suggested, the world is always, already interpreted. I would add that the interpretation is put in place by our use of language. — Banno

One day you might have to say what you think Davidson means by that.

I'd also like to hear something about what you think our use of language does exactly. Psychologists test how infralinguistic children model the world, and how crows do for that matter. Why language?

I was trying to argue that distrust of pharmaceuticals is a reason for as few people as possible to get vaccinated. — Isaac

But you have to link up distrust with "as few people as possible" in some specific way. Is it because the vaccine might actually be poison and you want as few people as possible to be poisoned? Is it because the seller is making money per dose, and you want them to make as little money as possible?

So that's a new thing, but let's not forget the overall shape of the argument: you've already claimed that the right thing to do is vaccinate people who need (defined in the usual way) the vaccine, and not vaccinate people who don't need it. That about covers it, right? The rest is empirical details about who actually needs it.

What difference could other thoughts about pharmaceutical companies make here? There's no room for "You need the vaccine, but ..." and no need for "You don't need the vaccine, plus ..."

It's the view that something exists regardless of what we say about ___." What on earth do we fill in the blank with?
— Srap Tasmaner

The “raw perceptual data” Isaac was talking about. It’s the view the raw perceptual data exists regardless of what we say about it. — khaled

But apples are not the raw perceptual data they cause us to have. And I don't see the point in preferring a locution like "whatever causes the raw perceptual data my model of the world identifies as a so-called 'apple'" rather than "apple".

@Isaac adds "cause" but withholds "object":

"...the cause of our representation of that something". Processes and objects are two different things, we can conceive of objects as being representations caused by hidden factors. We don't need to assign object status to those causes any more than gravity is an object, or my preferring vanilla is. — Isaac

My inclination here too is to say that my brain's model of the world, and I'm guessing everyone's, pretty clearly treats apples as objects, paradigmatic objects, if apples aren't objects then nothing is.

Its not exactly a question of language -- "object" as a noun isn't used that much by normies. It's a matter of accepting that the models in our heads are how we understand the world and knowing that they're models doesn't change that. The theories we work through consciously, we get a bit more say in, including how we theorize the models in our heads. But there's no coherent way to talk as if we're not modeling -- we know we can't but act as if enough caveats and scare quotes are almost like not modeling.

'Real' does seem to have a perfectly ordinary use which can be quite easily seconded to describe exactly the kind of active inference relationship to our external world that I'm looking to use it for. — Isaac

And I actually agree with that. I think in some sense "tables aren't real" and "apples aren't objects" is exactly what you should say. But it doesn't mean that the ordinary way of talking is mistaken; it's a way of making it clear you're using these words in a theory-specific way. (Roughly, "tables are not posits in this theory".)

There's a lot more to talk about there.

Realism is not the view that X exists regardless of what we say about it. It's the view that something exists regardless of what we say about it. — khaled

This seems to be the tree @Isaac is barking up too. I would find that a strange sort of realism. "I believe in somethings" -- but absolutely nothing you propose ever goes on the list of things I believe in, that is, things I'm a "realist about".

Here, look at the word "about", the word I'm tacking onto "realism". "About" takes an object. I quoted two sentences of yours, both ending with "what we say about it".

In the first, the antecedent of "it" is X, and the sentence could be rewritten: "Realism is not the view that X exists regardless of what we say about X."

What about the second? "It's the view that something exists regardless of what we say about ___." What on earth do we fill in the blank with? Were we talking about the something? Surely not, because then we'd be endorsing the first sentence's version of realism. Then what? "X"? "Realism is the view that something exists regardless of what we say about X." That's just non sequitur.

The only option I can see is to chop off the "about" phrase, but then the "regardless" clause has nothing to do. All you can really say is "Realism is the view that something exists." Is that realism? Realism about what? Something? That's not a view about anything.

I don't think we get to make this switch of "X" for "something". I think that's a misunderstanding of what "X" -- as a name or a label -- is doing in the first place. @Isaac and I went around and around about this before: it's no use saying "tables are only part of my model" as a way of saying "tables aren't real"; that's a category mistake. The whole point of modelling is that within the model, tables quite specifically count as real. Real is theory-relative.

(I think I'm saying exactly what Quine said, you know, "To be is to be a value of a bound variable." If you quantify over it, it's a posit of your theory, whether you like it or not.)

((I made exactly the same "argument" -- having forgotten about my old argument with Isaac -- in the "What is a fact?" thread. (That whether a statement is factual depends on the framework within which the statement is made.) It's starting to look like something I say out of habit, which bothers me.))

A muted, resentful vaccination for those for whom it's absolutely necessary, no fanfare and no reward is, I think, an appropriate response to the blatant exploitation of this crisis by these profiteering hoodlums. — Isaac

So what am I missing? If some people need to take a vaccine because their life choices, or just luck of the draw, puts them in a higher risk category for hospitalisation and spread, then why must we all take it? — Isaac

Here's what I think just happened -- look back through this little sub-thread and see if you agree.

You are making at least two claims: one is the "on average" thing; the other is that you personally don't trust pharmaceutical companies.

I endorsed the "on average" claim, distinguishing between reasons to believe that not everyone needs to get vaccinated and reasons to believe that everyone needs not to get vaccinated.

I presented an argument that your distrust of pharmaceutical companies is a reason for no one to get vaccinated, and is inconsistent with a belief that some people should. You tried to manage this inconsistency in your first response by resenting the fact that some people should trust vaccine vendors.

In your second response, you don't mention distrust of pharmaceutical companies at all, but you present the "on average" argument as a response to the claim that everyone should get vaccinated. I never made that claim; my argument was only to show that distrust of pharmaceutical companies does not belong here, but in an argument that no one should get vaccinated, an argument you do not intend to make but keep making.

(Maybe you recall that some time ago I suggested that your arguments on this issue strike me as "associative" rather than logical, and if I were presenting my position as you present yours I would worry. It's an indicator of motivated reasoning. --- I don't normally look into the motives of those I'm arguing with, but you and I know what we're about here and I trust you'll take the question in the spirit it's intended.)

Roughly, here you said "A and B" and I agreed to A but warned you off B, and then you presented A as if it's a response to my claim that B is inconsistent with A.

If you want to argue that vaccination is only indicated for those with risk factors -- which has consistently been your position, I believe -- then you need to accept that it is so indicated and stop making claims about the pharmaceutical industry in general that can only support the view that the vaccine is indicated for no one.

I can put it one more way: I addressed your claim that you have a reason not to take the vaccine and you responded, really quite specifically, by saying that you (and many others) don't have any reason to take the vaccine. That's a non sequitur. If I did that, or, more to the point, if I did that and didn't even notice that I'd done it, but it was pointed out to me, I'd worry that my reasoning was motivated.

A. The councillors refused to allow the protestors to demonstrate, because they advocated violence.

B. The councillors refused to allow the protestors to demonstrate, because they feared violence.

A computer can't understand that "they" applies to the protestors in A. but the councillors in B, because it's not immersed in our complex world of experience. — Daemon

I like this very much. Whether one could somehow, someday develop an artificial system that could deal with such a case, who knows. I lean toward your view, but I wouldn't put money on it either way.

But it is a lovely example of the sort of thing we manage easily everyday, only noticing when it goes wrong for some reason. Funny things, pronouns

The examples I gave were intended to illustrate that semantics isn't simply mapping! — Daemon

Of course it isn't. I'm surprised anyone would think it is. In point of fact, I'm not even sure what it's supposed to mean: people look up the meanings of words in dictionaries, sure, but you can't look up the meaning of a sentence in the sentence-dictionary, so if sentences have meanings, they must not "map" to them, or they must have a different kind of meaning.

This isn’t what I said. — AJJ

Good to know. I was confused and asked as clearly as I could.

I’ve recognised at this point that you’re a sneak. — AJJ

As you wish. I believe you have accused me of bad faith in every exchange we've had, but for the life of me I don't know why.

Source? — AJJ

Dividing 5 by 60.

Because it appears by not choosing you harm everyone for no benefit. — AJJ

I meant, why do you have to choose whether to sympathize with those who lost loved ones to the virus and those who lost something -- loved ones, livelihood, way of life -- to the response?

and the worldwide total is approaching 5 million.
— Srap Tasmaner

This isn’t particularly alarming when you consider that worldwide about 60,000,000 people die each year. — AJJ

An 8% increase in the world's mortality rate strikes me as significant.

My compassion is for those who have lost their livelihoods, their lives or the lives of their children to authoritarian measures implemented and advocated for by people too stupid to have done otherwise. — AJJ

Why should you choose?

In my view those disastrous consequences will be effected by mistaken people incapable of admitting fault — AJJ

I agree this is a serious concern. In the early days, public health officials had to make decisions before they knew how it was transmitted (remember the "droplets not aerosols" period?) and before they knew what the case fatality rate was. There have been changes in the guidance from various officials since the beginning, but that's tricky from a public confidence standpoint, plus there are always people that will claim this shows you don't actually know what you're doing. In 20/20 retrospect, maybe the lockdowns were more a result of institutional momentum than anything else. I think the jury is still out, but YMMV.

Still, the US has hit 700,00 dead and the worldwide total is approaching 5 million. The thing about a novel virus is that it is inherently more infectious, as no one is immune to it yet, and you do not, by definition, know enough to know how dangerous it is and what measures are appropriate. If we were over-cautious, that would be understandable; that we were is not really obvious from the death toll.

Oh I don't know.

The same reasoning underlies the decision of many people not to vote. (What difference could my one vote make?) Usually a plurality of eligible voters in the US don't vote, but lately we've seen substantial increases in voting. Maybe more Americans now believe their vote does matter.

Anecdotal aside.

The desertion argument is not just some academic theory. I have had a few customers argue, to my face, that since everyone else is wearing a mask, they don't have to. (And of course the history of conflict will yield examples.)

If something ought to be done on average, but there's some opposition, then I can see an argument that we all ought to do that thing (even if we're not part of that average), just to show solidarity, encouragement, etc... — Isaac

There's something of what you say here in the way social norms work -- the usual, driving on the right (or the left) side of the road because everyone else does. But there your self-interest presents no conflict.

Desertion is a cousin of the boar hunt, or the tragedy of the commons, or even the ultimatum game or prisoner's dilemma, where the dominant strategy for an individual leads to a less than optimal outcome for that individual, in some cases, and for the entire group of individuals "playing".

If you want the battle to be won, without your help (and the risk that helping entails), you have to hope that almost none of the other soldiers behave as rationally as you. (And you won't post your argument on the soldiers private chat.)

Either that, or you deem your reasons persuasive only to you, not to everyone. (This is the line I thought you were going to take.)

Your choices seem to be (1) not talking about your decision so as not to persuade anyone else, or (2) not talking about your decision because your reasons aren't persuasive.

You could, even more cynically, talk about your views just for fun, assuming everyone else is too stupid to understand that they too should desert.

What you really can't do, I think, is say, here are the reasons I found persuasive but I don't think you should; this is just "my truth", as the saying goes, and you have to find your own. That's (a) not playing the justification game properly, and, more importantly, (b) you actually want almost everyone to reach the opposite conclusion you did, so this is not some "to each his own" situation anyway.

What we're discussing here (or at least the point I'm trying to make) is that something which is good policy on average does not necessarily make it good policy for any given individual. — Isaac

There's the point about "what an average is". In the town where I live, there's a railroad trestle over a road that has a 9' clearance, and now and then someone drives a truck into it. On average, vehicles pass under it without issue, but not all vehicles. Simple.

But then there's the desertion paradox, that no soldier's individual contribution to the outcome of a battle is so great that he should risk injury or death, therefore every individual soldier has rational grounds for deserting, even if he wants the battle to be won. But of course if every soldier behaves that way then the battle will certainly be lost.

Around here, that ends up being a difference in the scope of "not", and it's hard to keep straight the difference between "not everyone should get vaccinated" and "everyone should not get vaccinated".

For instance, you have presented your distrust of pharmaceutical companies as a sort of personal quirk, which others ought to take as just your idiosyncratic reason not to get vaccinated. But if you are right about pharmaceutical companies then no one should trust them, and it ought to count for everyone as a reason not to get vaccinated. You present it as "the average is fine without me" but it's also naturally read as leading to the desertion paradox.

It sounds like you're discussing the intersubjective aspects of object permanence -- on-topic -- but in code, or using the forum as a metaphor.

But is it inevitable that humans with a complex language would always have constructed such formality? [ I.e., moral and ethical systems, I guess. ] Why when animals are able to form order and organisation without this does the human stand alone. — David S

I take it "is it inevitable" here means something like "Do we really have to? Couldn't we just not do this and be fine?" Which suggests human fretting over morals is a sort of mistake. Maybe we could just stop or maybe it's a mistake we can't help but make, because we are cursed with self-awareness. (Or cursed with some other property other animals lack -- there've been a lot of candidates for that over the years, usually something to do with thinking too much. Other animals live in a state we have in some sense fallen from, that sort of thing. "I think I could turn and live with animals ...")

On the other hand, your question could point in what amounts to the other direction. Other animals manage to have social organization without all this ethics business, but evidently we cannot, we need it -- which suggests humanity is kindof awful but making up for it with lots of thinking and talking. And that view too has been pretty common, although usually without the claim that other animals are just fine. (Usually the pitch would be that all animals are awful -- we're not special in that respect -- but we lucky devils have thinking and talking to make up for that. Or, if not awful, then certainly "amoral" -- seems to be a common view -- they're living their lives infra-morally, as children are infra-linguistic.)

There is another option, namely that we are simians through and through, but we also talk and wear clothes and build cities, all stuff we happen to do in addition to behaving like textbook simians.

My question then, is this: what exactly needs explaining?

A beaver made the dam intentionally. — Yohan

We don't know if the beaver builds a dam with intent — Manuel

We don't have to fall for this, treating "intention" as a super-concept like "belief". The only reason to say a beaver made the dam "intentionally" would be to rebut a suggestion that the beaver had made it accidentally or inadvertently or mistakenly, something like that.

I sometimes think of organisms as entities that do the non-obvious thing: some bit of the environment impinges on them, all sorts of stuff happens inside the organism and it responds to that impinging in a way an ethologist might predict but not a physicist. Sometimes when a homo sapiens makes sounds with its mouth another home sapiens will fire a gun at them or at someone else. That's non-obvious.

One simple way to distinguish the beaver dam from the beaver tracks is that the beaver tracks arise in an obvious way, just the physics of a beaver-weight body resting on beaver-foot-shaped appendages in the mud. You can't say the same about the beaver producing a dam.

Are dams artificial (in the sense of not naturally occurring) because beavers make them, rather than rivers? — Yohan

Yes.

Is there a difference in naturalness vs unnaturalness between beavers making dams and humans making dams? — Yohan

No.

I don't even understand what an alternative to "natural" means. — Manuel

Since I offered one of those, I'll bite: I think there's a difference between, say, a mountain pass carved out by a glacier and an anthill or a bird's nest. The latter are not things that "happened" but things an organism "did" or "made". We're at least moving along a spectrum toward artificial here.

I'd want to be able to distinguish between the tracks beavers might leave in the mud along the shore and the dam they built across the stream. Those are both effects of the presence of beavers, but they don't look like the same sort of thing to me at all.

Roughly speaking, I'm focusing on the process rather than the material (which is always natural) or the agent (likewise). As you move toward the artificial, there's an opportunity for design.

Or, not brought about intentionally. — Yohan

The opposite of "natural" is "artificial".

For instance, you can say you believe in angels or God, but if you literally say, I believe the ocean is blue, something is off because belief doesn't enter into it. You understand the ocean is blue, you see it. It's not an issue of belief.

This might be one of those words that gets you stuck in a fly bottle. — Manuel

I think it's the pressure of science. We know that what we see is model spun up by our brains, and we've attempted to press-gang the word "belief" into describing how we interact with our environment relying on such models. It has made it hard for us even to hear how strange it is to say, "I believe the ocean is blue." To modern, sophisticated ears, that doesn't sound bizarre; it sounds like an obvious truth, even a bit redundant.

Start with global social distrust and you will see that you are deprived of language entirely. — unenlightened

David Lewis agrees.

But I have to say, I'm beginning to feel a bit hamstrung by this:

I'm suggesting that reason is and ought to be only the slave of passion. — unenlightened

On the one hand, we who live in open societies tend to be pretty hands-off with other people's "values." The word we use these days for people who have ideas about other people's values is "Taliban."

Socrates and Confucius both lived in inegalitarian monocultures (not really, I know) with official religions. Maybe they are just particularly charming members of a Taliban. But maybe our conception of reason is too narrow; maybe there is a way to broaden our conception of reason to encompass wisdom again. To some of us, who take this instrumental view of reason, the natural temptation has been to fill the gap with more formalisms (more logic, more game theory, more Darwin -- we have a lot more tricks than Kant did), but is that the best we can do? (I know you are not so tempted, which is why I'm asking.)

@ssu recently posted an interview with John McWhorter in which he argues that "wokeness" is a religion. I find his view pretty persuasive but still disheartening. I want something between crying "Heretic!" and calling for public floggings, on the one hand, and "Well, Mr. Nazi, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about that." I mean, most of us do live in between, but we think we just happen to, that we do so because "these are our values" and other people not in the middle "just don't share our values." That's been turning out lately not to be particularly solid ground to stand on.

What do we do, un?

So what you're saying is because I might draw a blue marble, it does not matter what the probability is that I draw a red one. — InPitzotl

No, I'm saying that once you've drawn it doesn't matter if you were more likely to draw what you did or less likely. If the less likely outcome is what happened, on this single draw, you owe me money. That's all.

There is no number of times we can play where it's not true that you "might" win. — InPitzotl

I meant that your accumulated net winnings would gradually increase.

A bet is usually a stake laid on the outcome of an individual event, as here, and sometimes the favorite loses. Gambling as an ongoing enterprise to make money can follow the odds and the winnings should more than make up for the losses in the long term.

Being better at predicting is generally nice if you do it a lot, but you still don't get paid for making better predictions overall or for doing a better job of analysis than someone else; you get paid if and only if the horses finish as you said they would. — Srap Tasmaner

This makes no sense. Probability does matter, even for a single event; that's why it's useful in the first place. Even so, all you are doing if you bet "a lot" is changing the probability that you win — InPitzotl

It's a simple point.

Suppose I have an urn with 75 red marbles in it and 25 blue marbles. You bet me $5 that without looking you can reach in the urn and draw a red marble. The odds are 3:1 in your favor, but you still might draw a blue marble, in which case you owe me $5. It doesn't matter that you made the smart bet, that the odds were in your favor, you owe me $5. If we made the same bet a great number of times, the odds would tell, and you would make money on the exercise.

Honestly, I can't help you man. I think Fitch's paradox is crap, but TGW (of dear departed memory) thought it was a straight-up refutation of verificationism.

I only brought it up because you and @Olivier5 had essentially been debating verificationism -- I haven't followed the last couple pages of the exchange -- and I wanted to point you at prior art on that, but I thought it would be a little disingenuous to bring up a family of theories without noting that some people consider them already refuted.

So I decided just to point you at Fitch's as an entry point into the arguments around verificationism. I probably should have just said that.

We're not playing basketball; we're playing a prediction game. You chose the basketball game we bet on. You chose to bet on the Lakers winning. You chose the $5 wager. I chose to accept the wager. These are the variables that went into the bet. — InPitzotl

Prediction is interesting and there's a lot one could say about it. But the question for us, is how does betting engender facts in the world? I say that it creates obligations that we attach, arbitrarily, to the outcome of real events. Those obligations will be factual, once the event concludes, and they are determined by the event's outcome because we say they are. This, on my view, is the sense in which betting is a speech act. I say these are facts because once you've placed your bet, you are committed to acquiring an obligation, a debt, if that's how the event you were betting on turns out, and that connection is no longer up to you, but a fact. The one follows from the other as sure as the turning of the worlds.

How we decide what to bet on -- interesting though it may be, and important as it may be if you want to make a living doing this sort of thing -- doesn't matter in the least as far as the bets themselves are concerned. There are no points for style, no partial credit if you show your work. You can pick your horses using an ingenious system that needs a Cray to run it or you can close your eyes and jab the racing form with a pen. Your bets will pay off or not just the same. Being better at predicting is generally nice if you do it a lot, but you still don't get paid for making better predictions overall or for doing a better job of analysis than someone else; you get paid if and only if the horses finish as you said they would.

I don't think this cuts to the idea of what a bet is. Suppose Joe needs $10 and offers to wash my dishes to earn it. I tell Joe, "sorry, I only have $5, and I just bet on the Celtics game with Srap. Tell you what, though. If the Celtics win, I'll let you wash my dishes for $10." Despite what Joe and I have being conditioned on the same actions and events our bet is conditioned on, Joe and I do not have a bet... it's simply a conditional contract. — InPitzotl

It's neither a bet nor some other kind of contract but a promise. You have promised Joe that if the Celtics win you'll give him the dishwashing job. If the Celtics won, and Joe came around, you could get away with all sorts of excuses: "Sorry, Joe, I totally forgot I had promised my sister she could borrow ten from me. You understand." You freely promised, and people expect you to keep your promises, and Joe might think a little less of you, but then again he might not, since he had no claim on you. He might be very understanding and appreciative that you wanted to help him out even if you didn't end up doing so. You made a promise, but the Celtics winning doesn't mean you're in debt to Joe; the Lakers winning would mean you're in debt to me.

Wanted to acknowledge that I have not yet responded to this:

We have simply agreed to take certain actions -- one paying the other what is owed -- based on the outcome of an event. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't think this cuts to the idea of what a bet is. Suppose Joe needs $10 and offers to wash my dishes to earn it. I tell Joe, "sorry, I only have $5, and I just bet on the Celtics game with Srap. Tell you what, though. If the Celtics win, I'll let you wash my dishes for $10." Despite what Joe and I have being conditioned on the same actions and events our bet is conditioned on, Joe and I do not have a bet... it's simply a conditional contract. — InPitzotl

That's a nice hard case, but I wanted to lay out my view more fully before tackling it.

I'm taking some time and mulling it over. If I can't come up with a good response, it's certainly trouble for my position. Just wanted you to know I didn't miss this argument, @InPitzotl.

Yeah, but you can improve your chances if you study the riders and the horses before the bet, right? Then the competition can be who is the best at reading the facts and picking the winner. Have I understood correctly? — Athena

Of course, but all of that is before you place your bets. In a broad sense, you are competing as a handicapper against other handicappers to make the best prediction. But your analysis has no effect on the outcome of the race; your analysis has no effect on how much money you win or lose. If you continue to study the racing form while the horses are running, you don't improve your chances of winning. Once the bets are placed, everything is beyond your control, as any handicapper will ruefully tell you. Before you've placed your bet, you have accepted no risk and can receive no reward. There is no point at which you can make an effort to improve the chances of a bet you've placed paying off.