Let P be the statement — Banno

I've spent way too much time in old logic textbooks. Some of them introduce this sort of thing rather casually -- "You know about assigning variables from your math classes; here we do it with English sentences" -- while others devote entire chapters to attempting to formalize -- okay, how do I complete this sentence?

Can I say, "formalize statements like the above"? Is it a statement? In what language? Is it the same language the rest of the proof is in? Or a meta-language? Which one is P part of? Is "Let P ..." part of the proof?

Or do I have to say "formalize a sequence of symbols like the above"? Only if you head this way -- dreaming of a reduction of semantics to syntax -- you end up facing a rather unpleasant choice between saying that the logic we're building is just a bit of math, a rule-governed domain of symbol manipulation that has nothing to do with reasoning in a natural language, or saying with Montague that natural languages are in fact formal languages, that linguistics is in fact a branch of mathematics.

My meta-logic -- unlike Curry's! -- is weak, so this is probably all bollocks. I'm just pointing out that the interesting part of what's going on here is certainly not in the perfectly routine application of standard inference rules, but in the line at the top we pass right over without thinking, that innocent little "Let P ..."

And nowhere does it state that we have to mandate people to take a vaccine and deny them access to society if they do not. — NOS4A2

Because to you that would make our society unjust, and you don't want our society to be unjust. You're one of us; you just express it as if you're not.

I think the interest of society is invisible to you, because what you describe is no society at all, but the proverbial war of all against all.

I do not believe there is evidence that human beings, over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, have ever actually been so blinkered in their worldview. First it was kin, then tribe and village, and over time ever larger groups of people competing and cooperating ever more indirectly, but with at least one purpose in common: the continuation of this society we have made. It's not a trick someone played on us; it's what humans have always done.

If you want to oppose something you think of as The State -- go ahead and do that, let's hear the argument, but you'll have to oppose it with something better than an eternal battle royale. If such a condition were real, it would be a complete clusterfuck. But it's not real, never has been. We have never been that stupid.

If you don’t own anyone’s body, what gives you the right to force vaccines upon them, make medical decisions for them, or otherwise attempt to assert your will with theirs? Nothing. — NOS4A2

You're right that we have a right to bodily autonomy; that sets the bar for state interference high, but not infinitely high. The US Supreme Court has already ruled once before that pandemics clear that high bar.

We always have to balance the interests of the individual against the interests of society at large; there is no blanket expectation that one will always trump the other. It depends on the right that will be infringed, to what degree it will be infringed, the seriousness of the state's interest, and the tailoring of state action to further the interest of society as a whole while minimizing the infringement of the rights of individuals. At least in the US, I believe that's how it's supposed to work.

I do see a reason for the different phrasing — Antony Nickles

So do I, insofar as I speak English. Proving it about someone else's usage takes a bit of legwork, that's all.

Perhaps as excuses to save pride or avoid shame? — Antony Nickles

If shame is one of the options when you don't feel like playing chess, I've already fucked up pretty badly as a parent.

I still say your whole approach to this conversation is screwy.

The expectation on our side is that you provide your reasons and explain how you justify your decision; you don't have to do that if you don't want to, there's no gun to your head.

But you keep offering a substitute: comparing what one of us says about your decision to what the faceless public doesn't say about other decisions made by other people.

Suppose my roommate and I go to the grocery store. I grab a half-gallon of milk, and he says, "Why don't you get a gallon, it's cheaper that way?" Then I say, "Well, everybody seems to think getting cable-tv is just fine, when there are cheaper alternatives." "Dude, you talked me into cord-cutting like two years go, what ... ?" "But lots of people still get cable." "What does that have to do with the milk in your hand?"

Can you really not see how weird this is, @Isaac?

3. People knowingly acting in a way that puts their health services under strain is a problem for which lack of vaccination among the otherwise healthy is dwarfed by other lifestyle choices. — Isaac

None of which can be addressed by an intervention that takes a total of about half an hour of your life, none of your money, and with no other changes to your lifestyle. This whole section (3) leaves out cost. Quitting smoking, quitting drinking, eating healthier and exercising are all lifelong pursuits; the first two, definitely, and the third probably, are monetarily cheaper than not doing so, but they are also notoriously difficult and involve broader changes in lifestyle, not the least of which is changes in how you socialize.

But the risks associated with these behaviors are high, so determined individuals bear high costs to change their behavior. Your risk of serious illness if unvaccinated is low-ish. It can be reduced a certain amount by an intervention that is very close to zero-cost. That suggests that the ratio of reduced risk to cost is going to be awfully high. Compare to someone who changes their diet: reduced risk of cardiovascular or metabolic disease at a cost of never again eating food you enjoy, that you grew up with, and that socializing is often organized around. People do make that change. Is their benefit-to-cost ratio about the same as yours would be? Orders of magnitude greater? Or smaller?

Most people here see getting the shot as doing almost nothing, practically zero-cost. Even small marginal benefit is a good bet for close to zero cost.

You see getting vaccinated as somewhat high cost: it goes against several of your principles. You could just stand on that, and say, "I will not under any circumstances consent to getting vaccinated, no matter the benefit to me or anyone else." But instead you say

I might choose to remain unvaccinated and take that risk for entirely trivial reasons (preferring not to take prophylactic medicine, preferring not to support the pharmaceutical industry are just two examples) — Isaac

Are these reasons trivial to you? Evidently they raise your cost of getting vaccinated substantially.

example of skydiving — Isaac

Do you obtain the thrill of the skydiver by not taking the vaccine? — Hanover

Skydiving is a popular sport in the U.S., and in 2020, participants made approximately 2.8 million jumps at more than 200 USPA-affiliated skydiving centers across the country. In 2020, USPA recorded 11 fatal skydiving accidents, a rate of 0.39 fatalities per 100,000 jumps. This is comparable to 2019, where participants made more jumps—3.3 million—and USPA recorded 15 fatalities, a rate of 0.45 per 100,000.

Each fatality is a heartbreak for the skydiving community, which has collectively taken steps each year to learn from these events and improve the sport. Consequently, better technology, improvements to equipment and advancements in skydiver-training programs have made the sport safer than ever before.

USPA (then called the Parachute Club of America) began keeping records on annual fatalities in 1961, and that first year, PCA recorded 14 skydiving deaths. The numbers increased significantly over the next two decades, peaking in the late 1970s, when fatalities were in the 50-plus range for several years. The annual number of deaths stayed in the 30s through the 1980s and 1990s before beginning a slow, general decline after 2000. In 2018, the annual fatality count hit a record low of 13, followed by 15 in 2019. Now we’re at another record low of 11 in 2020.

Tandem skydiving—where you’re attached to an experienced skydiving instructor for your jump—has an even better safety rate, with one student fatality per 500,000 jumps on average over the past 10 years. — Untied States Parachute Association

My risk of dying from Covid even if unvaccinated is extremely small (1 in several thousand) — Isaac

So about two orders of magnitude greater than the risk associated with skydiving, an example I assume will not be brought up again.

I think in terms of basic conventions, basic habits. We don't justify driving on the correct side of the road. Either side works. All that matters is that we all drive on the same side. This echoes the arbitrary nature of the sign. — Zugzwang

Obligatory plug for David Lewis's Convention: either side of the road is an equilibrium, a stable solution to the coordination problem.

Why, then, are we only inclined to say so? Witt uses the phrase at least 30 other times in the text, say, at #144. He also uses, "we should like to say", "we are tempted to say", "we might say". I would call these the data of investigation. Evidence from which he makes his claims to the grammar of an example, sometimes for correction, sometimes to allow for greater possibilities. — Antony Nickles

What's clearly missing from this list is "compelled" and friends. (Wittgenstein exegesis holds little interest for me, so I'm not going to chase up where he says "here we can only say ..." or some variation of that, but I guess you might want to compare the two sets, if you could be certain the variation isn't stylistic.)

I like the "turning toward each other as (moral?) agents" idea you floated. I've had the experience of teaching my own children how to play chess -- their choice, not mine, I'm not a monster -- and as with anything taxing, there will come a point where they are overwhelmed or bored or thinking about something else. One of the things a child will do in such a situation is be silly: I check their king and they move a rook in a great curving arc, flying over various pieces and pawns, and capture my piece. That's not misunderstanding but a signal that they're done for now. The best response always seemed to me to join them in the new silly barely-any-rules game, which will end very quickly and then they can go off and do what they'd rather be doing.

Some parents tend to be a little tone-deaf about this sort of thing and think they have to insist upon every rule all the time -- "Look if you're not going to play right, ..." Treating failure as self-exclusion from the game (as readers of LW sometimes will) strikes me as similarly tone-deaf. "I don't want to play anymore right now -- in fact I just can't play anymore right now because my brain is tired" is not the same as "I don't want to play" or "I don't understand" or "I don't want to learn this" or any of the various other ways the game you're playing might stop, or might just pause for a while. Being alive to those differences matters, I think, and in that moment you need to remember why you are there playing together in the first place. Maybe that purpose can be put on hold for a while, or maybe it can be served by playing something else.

It's a pity there's so little in Wittgenstein about games evolving or morphing into other games, so that his readers, especially the less sympathetic, have always had to deal with the temptation to take "game" as indicating a closed, static rule system. The games my children have played among themselves generally evolved so rapidly they had trouble keeping track.

Anyhow, I like the idea, @Antony Nickles, whether it's yours or Cavell's or Wittgenstein's.

This move is close to terrifying in that it privatizes behavior that the government could not get away with if engaged in directly. — Ennui Elucidator

Yes. I'm guessing someone in a think-tank somewhere was damn pleased with themselves when they had this idea. (And somebody in the Texas legislature got a copy of the inevitable white paper.)

Maybe they had been reading about the Cultural Revolution and thought it looked like a clever way of unleashing third-party true believers on the trouble-makers.

Perhaps state governments all over the United States will decide it's about time they substituted the Party for the State.

It is an absolutely jaw-dropping perversion of our system of representative government, and I shudder to think what this country will be like soon if it catches on.

Surely Congress has the needed authority under the commerce clause. <ducking>

In all seriousness though, there is a conundrum here: how to make a just law that by definition will neither constrain nor protect the behavior of just under half the American population, but only the behavior of the other half, and based on a characteristic not of their choosing and about which they can do nothing.

Your only option is not to target women at all, but either their unborn children or the providers of the service. Constraining or protecting the behavior of providers looks like the dodge that it is though: only half of Americans could conceivably seek that service, so I don't know why judges wouldn't treat that as in effect constraining or protecting only half the population. Which means you're practically forced to consider the unborn children, and there's no consensus on what to do there.

Therefore neither the several States nor the federal government should enact laws either restricting or protecting abortion. Unless, of course, you can make a case that we can make just laws that only apply to tall people or fat people or gay people or people between the ages of 30 and 35. (Obviously I'm passing by stuff like anti-discrimination laws, which are just the inverse.) I suppose there's a sense in which we already do this with serious mental illness and proclivity to anti-social and criminal behavior -- but that's a can of worms in itself.

The problem I have with extending it to vaccines is the extent to which we can use these others as proxies. — Isaac

Yes I thought of that but then deliberately didn't think about it, because that puts you -- taking "you" as whoever's making a decision here -- back in the position of judging the facts and the science, which we've stipulated you are not competent to do. If you are competent to make this decision, the argument's not for you; if you aren't but insist you are, oh well, did my best.

(Although I could try to something else to burst your bubble: suppose I could get my hands on a comprehensive cross-tabbed survey of medical and medical research professionals, and I could actually pull out very close comps: "Look, here's 19,815 experts all about your age with extremely similar risk-factor profiles and all but 11 of them have gotten vaccinated." If that wouldn't convince you I'd have to assume you're not just not interested in the social norm at all.)

Children -- look, we can ignore children. They aren't being asked to choose whether to get vaccinated. Similarly, those with serious medical conditions -- they already have a modified decision-making process that is at least cooperative and perhaps beholden to the professionals providing and managing their care.

There are clearly factors determining this particular ought. That means that the factors (not the normative) are the relevant variable. — Isaac

So that's wrong and misses the whole point of the exercise. Because you are not competent to judge these factors, you want to know what the norm is among people who are, and it will carry considerable weight for you if you care about social norms.

only categorical propositions are falsifiable — Neri

?

the vast majority of doctors and scientists are encouraging vaccinations. Around 96% of doctors have gotten the vaccine themselves. — Xtrix

Again, in what way can a doctor be an expert in which values are most important, such that they can give an expert opinion on what one ought to do? — Isaac

Here's one way of bridging ye olde is-ought gap -- dunno if it's all that persuasive.

As I've mentioned, one of the curious features about vaccination as a "moral quandary" is that it's one everybody faces. I've leaned on this to explain why everyone feels entitled to an opinion about everyone else's decisions: at the very least it's something they've already thought through and have a ready-to-hand opinion about it. But it also means I have the option of looking to the decisions of many others to help make my own decision. That could be a matter of exemplars (this politician I trust got it, so I should get it) or of numbers (almost everyone is getting it, so I should get it).

I might be particularly interested in the decisions of people like me in many ways but more qualified to judge the science than I am. Most "moral quandaries" don't turn on how well you understand the facts of the case -- that's an epistemological problem -- and certainly don't turn on how well you understand some particular field of science it would take you many years to master. Your lack of training and knowledge could very well block you from completing an otherwise clear decision-making process that results in an ought. But there are people who are not so handicapped and I could take them as proxies for how I would decide if I didn't get stuck at the facts-and-science step of my reasoning.

Now let's add to that another fact: the doctors and scientists and public health officials who have gotten vaccinated at very high rates, are all citizens of the same country I am. Suppose we treat each citizen as an expert on citizenship in just the same sense that everyone counts as an expert in their native language. It doesn't mean we all agree on everything, but there's tremendous overlap driven by a shared goal of preserving a working solution to a cooperation problem. You are not without exception required to speak your native language exactly as everyone else does -- they're not all uniform anyway -- but their aggregate opinion, made manifest in the way they use words, does indeed count as a rule you ought to follow -- just not quite 100% ought. If we look at citizenship in a similar way, then we can reach similar conclusions, that indeed every citizen expects every other citizen to conform to some set of norms that are bound up with citizenship, and it shouldn't be hard to see that.

From this I conclude that within the subset of citizens actually qualified to make the decision at all, the norm of behavior is to get vaccinated. And therefore there is a norm that I ought to get vaccinated. QED and a bottle of rum.

Sellar's "space of reasons" and "space of causes". — Janus

Bingo! You win a prize, @Janus!

You are right to think that causal explanations do not provide rational justification for a given belief. (We have to agree to table perception though )

You are wrong to think we need free will to keep them out. If I want to talk about justification, neither causes nor their denial have any place there. It's a different framework altogether.

And that's true for conversations as well. You can describe them within a social psychological framework or within a rational analysis framework. The latter does not need or want a denial of whatever views about causation are included in the former.

I have some sympathy with this view, at least if we dial back the optimality a little and just assume we're learning organisms that get better at being rational, something like that.

On the other hand, I have a whole different compatibility approach that acknowledges two different frameworks for describing our thoughts, although I find it much easier to get confused here than with your suggestion. (See the hash I'm about to make of my conversation with @Hanover below. Sometimes I wish I were better at philosophy.)

This is the quandary - if you accept that beliefs that are caused are not arrived at by reason, you have no way of knowing whether they happen to also be reasonable.

So, (1) I believe the earth is round based upon causality, and (2) there are objective reasons to believe the earth is round. How do I ever know #2, given #1? All I have access to is #1. — Hanover

The answer I want to give is that this is clearly false: I don't only have access to (1). And then I give the example of having an idea for a chess move which I then analyze. The causes that led to my entertaining that candidate move are one thing -- a thing I likely don't have access to -- but the analysis is a whole different thing, and the analysis is where I establish whether the move is reasonable.

But that's not your issue. Your issue is that whatever I do by why of analyzing a candidate move is also caused, so it's a thought of the same type. Your argument is that

(a) I never get access to uncaused thoughts, and
(b) only uncaused thoughts are arrived at by reason, and
(c) only thoughts arrived at by reason are reasonable.

(b) is obviously true; (a) I think I want to accept because rejecting it strikes as believing in magic, sorry; but I still see no argument for (c) and that's exactly what I asked for last time.

Why should the history of my having a thought, a psychological phenomenon, have any bearing on whether that thought is supported or supportable by reason, which is an entirely different theoretical framework, and one that I have access to?

I mean, there's a regress, if you want to go that way: I have an idea for a move, don't know why; I analyze it in a certain way, don't know why; how do I know the second step conforms to reason without analyzing it? I don't. But neither do the believers in uncaused thoughts.

I must be missing something obvious, for which I apologize, but I'm not getting it. I think you're saying that if I believe thoughts are caused I have to completely give up the other theoretical framework by which we judge thoughts as reasonable, but for the life of me I don't see why. For you that verb "judge" has to mean "freely judge" and if the judgment itself is caused it doesn't count, but that looks like a circular argument to me. (I want to say here that "judge" is a psychological term in one framework but not in the other, but I don't know if that helps or hurts. And now I've said it anyway.)

We just shouldn't get caught up in the social exercise of what is a private function. — Isaac

This I think I need a little clarification on. -- I have thoughts, but it's easier to ask.

You may well review and revise your stories, select others which fit better or feel more satisfying, these may well lead to better actions in the future. That's not the necessarily same thing as you engaging in the social game of review and revision. — Isaac

This is the main point I hadn't been clear on. Even in cases where the two processes are naturally related -- as in a philosophical discussion -- they are not the same process, can't be the same process, aren't even the same kind of process.

Totally with you -- got there by a different route long ago -- but I hadn't connected the dots. Makes many of my remarks about intuition at least a little irrelevant, if still charming. We are still interested in how people form and revise their beliefs, but on a separate track we're interested in how people discuss their beliefs, and we're interested in the nexus of the two but without assuming there's just a sort of wave of reason that passes through groups of people causing each of them to speak in turn and enlightening the rest.

I have some worries I suspect we're about to get to. It might be best to go back to the coronavirus example to clarify what we're up to.

if an argument is presented that implicates an unworkable logical outcome, that can't be ignored simply because it broaches a topic not of personal interest — Hanover

I suppose that's fair. I was a little feisty about it, but I tried to indicate that I'm not sure it's an issue worth anyone's interest, not in the form it's usually presented.

On the other hand, your original point was about objectivity and you never picked up that thread. Putting the pieces together I get something like this:

1. Our beliefs are objective only if arrived at through reason.
2. If our beliefs are caused then they are not arrived at through reason.
Therefore
3. If our beliefs are caused, then they are not objective.

Is that the argument? I mean, (2) is clearly true, but what's the justification for (1)? Why isn't (1) something more like "Our beliefs are only objective if supported by reason"? Then (1) would leave room for post-facto justifications, which, as I said, is more or less how I use the word "rationalization". (If the word "rationalization" is the problem because it has a disreputable common usage, I'm happy to drop it.)

But why does that have to be the actual process? It feels like we're treading perilously close to a genetic fallacy, or mixing up discovery and confirmation. -- Is that the right pair of terms? I remember at one time it being a big deal in the philosophy of science, that the steps leading to an insight, an hypothesis, might not be logical or defensible, might be some chance thing, but no worries because the process of testing that hypothesis are completely different, rigorous, logical and exacting. Maybe people don't think that anymore, but it always made sense to me. I'd have ideas at the chessboard and no idea where they came from, but then you have to analyze. That simple. Maybe that's another reason post-hoc justification seems so natural to me.

NOTE ADDED:
Not challenging your use of "objective" but what's it mean here? Is it synonymous with "arrived at by reason"?

I've always thought that compatibilism is a fudge, though, because the logics of determinism and freedom just don't mesh with one another. — Janus

I'm so indifferent to the issue I don't even care if you call me a "compatibilist" (as people have Strawson). Isms are junk, suitable only for doing cereal-box philosophy. ("This one tastes better but I know this other one is better for me, hmmmm." Like that. That's not thinking, that's shopping.)

our justifications are mere self preservation rationalizations — Hanover

rationalization as well and therefore useless — Hanover

Meant to respond to this idea. No.

The only things I want to capture by using the familiar word "rationalization" are that they are rational -- they do work to justify the position they're supposed to -- and they are post-hoc.

I think of them like proofs in mathematics: you can have a crummy proof that you stumble on god knows how and thus learn that a hypothesis is true; later you can come up with a beautiful proof that shows the deep connections between things, those connections motivating each step, with the result being a sequence of steps that shows clearly why the theorem is true and illuminates the field of which it is a theorem. The latter is better, and the latter is the kind of rationalization we like.

if determinism is true, then beliefs are not rationally, but causally, determined — Janus

Sure, I get that.

And if the thesis of determinism is true, then some of the things I say, and some of the things you could reasonably claim are presupposed both by what I say and by my saying them, are not literally true. Whatever that means, if anything.

I don't see why I have to care. I absolutely do not know what the current thinking either in science or in philosophy is on determinism. I don't know if it's a well-defined thesis at all. I do not endorse it.

But neither do I endorse what Strawson famously called the "obscure and panicky metaphysics of libertarianism." That position I know I can't make any sense of.

So I'm inclined to pass by the whole question as ill-formed, and I'm not at all inclined to throw in with either side. There's plenty of other stuff to think about.

If you take seriously the idea that your beliefs are beyond your control, you have no reason to debate your beliefs. — Hanover

And evidently don't need one, as you just said. It's still a fact that I do. Maybe what I say causes your beliefs to change or fails to; maybe you evaluate my words rationally and freely choose to agree or not. What difference does it make?

Telling me I'm stuck arguing for X because my ilk just believes that way — Hanover

And again that's just empirically false and you could easily prove it.

Is it inconsistent to disbelieve this part (the "fixed" and "stuck" business) if I believe the other part?

The "fixed" part is just empirically false, but can't I believe that my beliefs are fully determined by my state and my environment, rather than a matter of free choice, and just note that what I read, the arguments people make to me, and so on, are also part of my environment, and go into modifying my state?

According to Strawson, less than you might think.

the psychologists fallacy — Hanover

Not wild about this argument. Or maybe I just don't quite understand it. Is the idea that psychologist's claim is self-refuting, or are we just calling out a double standard? Maybe I just can't work up much enthusiasm for the idea of "objective truth", either to affirm it or deny it.

How do you see this argument "biting"? Can you spell it out a little for me?

Except, of course, it's all bullshit because the idea that people are truly assessing reasons like philosophical jewellers examine a diamond for flaws is nonsense. The decision comes first, then the assessment of reason to find sufficient flaws to justify it. — Isaac

Here I am slowly peeling back the lid so that the worms can only come out of the can one by one and we get a chance to look at them, and then you come along and just smash the thing open on the counter.

First, even if our reasons are rationalizations, they can be "good" or "bad": not all stories make sense.

Next, given Quine-Duhem, maybe the reasons you give are not your actual reasons in any meaningful sense, but they could have been, and what difference does it make?

And when it comes to other people's ideas, I tend to think the intuitive, even "emotional" response is valuable, even when it precedes whatever rational support we can find for it. (My posting history is littered with proof.) Something in me has run some models and said "no", I just don't know why. And I happen to *really* enjoy trying to figure out what my intuition might have spotted on my behalf. It could turn out my intuition has been jumping to conclusions again and I can overrule it. Bad intuition! Bad! But it gets a lot right too.

Your burden would be to show how the roles we play and the stories we tell can evolve, without a two-tiered model that explicitly accommodates review and revision. I think.

I have several thousand other things to say about all this...

should someone like myself be here? — Jem

Yes. If you want to.

Most of us are full of shit. Don't believe the hype.

If we can adopt roles just by changing clothes, then it seems unlikely that an all pervasive just-like-me system is in play. — Isaac

I honestly have no idea what value the "just-like-me" idea has. It is An Idea I Had, so I've been screwing around with it.

One point about it of interest is that in the vaccination case, everyone who has an opinion about another's behavior has faced the same choice, or some variation on the same choice, as those they are judging, which is a little unusual; and what's unusual about that -- as opportunities for moral judgment go -- is taken as the usual case for discussions that aspire to transcend taste: philosophy, politics, science, the sort of stuff we do around here.

We don't treat differences of opinion as a matter of taste here: when a question is put to you, it is the same question that's put to everyone; disagreement between you and me is exactly a case of you not being enough like me. Maybe that counts as a case of this:

What we could say, I suppose, is that we still have a just-like-me judgement system when we're within roles (ie judging someone in the same role as us). — Isaac

It's just a little thin, at first glance, to call discussing philosophy "taking on the role of person-discussing-philosophy". On the other hand, people do have a surprising amount to say about the behavior they expect of their fellow discussers -- "I don't have the burden of proof, you do," "Why won't you answer my question?!" "Why do you keep bringing that up, I've already addressed it!" and the rest. Maybe it's just that within a discussion there are a number of different roles available and we tend both to lose track and make too much of which role each participant is supposed to be playing at the moment. Bleh.

Anyhow, this thread did have a kind of doubling up of the usual demand that everyone have the same opinion I do -- as a matter of philosophical integrity -- as a bonus demand that they make the same decision I did IRL.

I suppose what's of particular interest to you is when the social roles or the parts we're playing obtrude upon our "universal" discussion. People use this as an accusation -- "Of course, you'd think that, because you're a tree-hugging Gaia worshiper." This amounts to a claim that I have reasons for my beliefs but your beliefs are caused, which might be the most widely held belief on the forum.

I can't make sense of any of that. @Banno?

Which becomes viciously circular — tim wood

How so?

comprehensive — Julian Malek

I'm rather fond of Jonathan Dancy's Contemporary Epistemology, wide-ranging undergraduate-level survey.

In my view states are a necessary evil, and the nature of states seems to be that they inherently rely on force, but what you describe seems like one of the more agreeable ways to go about it. Do you know an example of such a state? — Tzeentch

If by "rely on force" you mean something like, "rely on force to impose the state on people who don't want it", I have nothing to say about such a view. If you mean "rely on force to enforce property rights", then we're talking at least about all advanced democracies.

It's the basic difference discussed in the book: if you live where there's the rule of law and property rights, the state is bigger than any bully that would take your stuff and provides recourse for you; live in a country run by warlords and gangsters and the most you can hope for is that A will defend your interests against B (provide, as they say, "protection"), but that's no guarantee whatsoever that A won't decide eventually to rip you off himself, or make a deal with B that grants B your stuff, or lose out to B in a power struggle, or just forget that he promised to protect you.

The former kind of nations succeed.

Yes, I'm tempted to say scripts are cheaper. The trouble with same-as-me, is that it always has caveats, it requires the assessment of sameness. Scripts tend to already accommodate variety. — Isaac

That's very interesting. You could be absolutely right. Of course my approach has been to presume that we put as little work as possible into the sameness judgment -- starting from zero, just assuming it, and revising as little as possible at each step. So you could be right that just assigning to someone an off-the-shelf role is cheaper. Sadly, this is starting to look like something you'd want to design experiments for and the armchair phase might be done.

I'm stepping out of role, by not getting vaccinated, or being insufficiently just-like-them, but the response is to assume I've done so mistakenly? I'm not sure that quite describes the responses, seems like there's more to it. — Isaac

Sure. But now I have a new way of describing my thing about "not believing in disagreement": same-as-me can assume you're not getting vaccinated because there's something you don't know (that I do), or don't understand (that I do), or indeed that you've made a mistake, some error of reasoning (that I didn't). You having your own reasons, also valid, is the absolute last resort. There may even be some general exasperation at having to go all the way to the end of the list of options for dealing with you -- you've cost people precious calories, and at each step towards the next more expensive option there's this hope that we're about to be done, right before that hope is dashed.

All of that is *before* genuine disagreement is acknowledged, grudgingly, and I don't have anything to say about that yet.

No, I think managing one's disputes through individual agreements is a good way to go about things. — Tzeentch

Have you read Why Nations Fail?

Some states take on the role of ensuring the property rights of their citizens and mediating the inevitable property disputes.

States that don't do that tend to end up with the strongest just taking whatever the fuck they want, and eventually that's everything, including the state apparatus.

If your view is that this is more or less the only sort of state in the world -- the bully that takes whatever it wants and has guns -- I get that, but Acemoglu and Robinson lay out an empirical case that you can actually see the difference, that it's real, and that it explains why some countries thrive and some don't.

The simplest things I can think of are cases where something blocks action. That could be something external, akrasia, laziness, uncertainty, who knows. I could recognize in my own case that I have chosen a course of action but not carried it out yet, and describe this as having an intention. If you tell me you have chosen a course of action, and I know you haven't acted, I could describe you as having an intention.

For an action actually carried out, we're in Quine-Duhem territory: there are any number of ways of describing the action, mixing reasons and causes and beliefs and preferences and circumstances. Presumably the only reason to bother parsing intention and friends here is to make better predictions than we can make just using the action itself.

For the blocked-action case, it seems like the baseline would be a single prediction: that the intended act will be carried out. (And then we can modify later as we lose patience and so on.) We can think of intention as the well-defined little box into which we put "what you will do unless ..." So an intention is a special kind of prediction. Duh.

One funny thing about this is that if it's a single prediction (instead of a whole complex with various confidences), we can reverse the association -- that is, treat something for which we have a single prediction as if it were an intention.

I think you can actually hear this in daily conversation. If the baseline expectation is same-as-me, I can just predict you'll continue to be same-as-me. (Single prediction, yay!) If it turns out you've not taken some action I would have, or in fact have, I assume you intend to (this is the previous paragraph's point).

"Got my jab yesterday. You get yours?"
"No."
"But you're going to right?"

It's the immediate fallback. If you're not just like me, something stopped you from being like me -- gosh, what could it have -- nope, doesn't matter what it was, no use spending calories on that, presumably things will get back on track soon and you'll be just like me again. I predict it, therefore you intend it.

We know from our own case how externalities can interfere with our actions, and when we're forced to consider someone's behavior diverging from our prediction, we'll reach for that first, and preserve the assumption that your intention is to be like us. To show you this chain of reasoning, movies have to use dialogue, and they do this all the time:

"How was your date with Marcus last night?"
"I didn't go."
"Oh, got called into work again?"
"No."
"Marcus couldn't make it?"
"No."
"????" unable even to form the thought that you decided not to go.

The point of all of this is that we might use the same-as-me strategy as the starting point for judgment because it's dirt cheap. Similarly we might use same-as-me predictions because they're dirt cheap, guaranteed to be degenerate non-branching decision trees. Non-branching trees we talk about as intentions, both for ourselves and for others. (This is consonant with current neuroscience, right? We act, for reasons we know not, and if needed bolt-on a retrodiction of that action and call it the intention we had when we acted.) Non-branching trees are cheaper, and we will resist giving them up even when surprised.

I keep emphasizing the same-as-me strategy because it does seem like the cheapest baseline available, but your (Goffmanesque?) scripts and part-playing are similar, right? Once I've stocked my toolkit with single-path predictions that can be quickly and cheaply selected, I'll insist on using them. And when you fail to say the lines I've assigned you, my immediate fallback will be assuming you intend to say them and something stopped you. Acknowledging that you diverged on purpose is the last thing I want to do, because then to predict you I'll have to engage in expensive research (i.e., talk to you, which is not so bad, talk is cheap, but in this case I'll also have to listen to you and that blows).

Always a pleasure. Cheers!

Goffman on Frame Analysis and Lakoff on metaphor, I hope. Their best contributions. — Isaac

Exactly. Goffman looks like he's almost too much fun to read.

It's nit that we actually want everyone to be like us — Isaac

Yes, that's what I find interesting about the bone-headed approach; "just like me" isn't in there as a goal or even a preference. It's just a really cheap analysis. It's "process", but shows up as if it's a preference in almost exactly the same way models also behave as if they're filters. I need a cheap way to figure out your behavior, so I start by comparing you to me. It's not about my preferences at all, but it looks like it is.

Will have to get to the rest later. I still really want to see what will drive us to form abstractions like "intention" that we'll use in more sophisticated analysis.