4 is greater than 3 by definition, not mathematics. — T Clark

One of us is missing the point, maybe it's me. We're exposed to lots of definitions, and people argue about those definitions, except when it comes to mathematics.

That disagreement is socialized out of them. — Terrapin Station

That may be. School and home try to socialize kids in all sorts of ways, but this is the only one that sticks universally, so far as I can tell.

it's simply a factor of how humans (and perhaps persons in general--it might not be limited to humans) tend to think about relations on the most abstract level. — Terrapin Station

That also may be.

I have no opinion to share at the moment on why it is so. My point is only what I said: mathematics holds a unique position.

If President Trump wants to claim that the crowd at his inauguration was bigger than the crowd at President Obama's, he can't just say, "I think 317,000 is more than 513,000." He has to say that the estimates of attendance at each event were wrong. Not only is that a good strategy, it's the only strategy because everyone on earth agrees that 513,000 > 317,000.

I brought it up because this thread was supposed to be about what happens when relativists and non-relativists argue. Well, one of the things that happens is that they agree on basic mathematics. They may disagree on where the numbers come from and what they mean. That might be ever so important to the argument. Not denying any of that.

@tim wood seems worried that there is no absolute truth that everyone accepts, and that not everyone even agrees there is such a thing. I'll grant that it's not what he wanted, but mathematics appears to me to enjoy universal acceptance.

Look at the way you guys are arguing over the definition of "relativism," and compare that to your behavior when it comes to math. Suppose you were having this argument over dinner and then split the check. It might take a few tries, but you would agree on an answer within minutes, after arguing for hours about the definition of a single word.

Unless you're curious that there's near universal acceptance of the definitions of terms? — Michael

Um, yeah. Math alone is treated as objective, as objectively true, by all parties to all arguments. That's ever so slightly an overstatement--I'm leaving to one side discussion of the foundations of mathematics. Outside of that vanishingly small exception, nothing even comes close to the universality with which mathematics is accepted.

Not even logic. Natural language is so complex, so much depends on context, on unstated assumptions, that people can argue endlessly whether A follows from B. They argue about the meanings of words. They argue about what words mean "to them," or what they "should" mean. They argue endlessly about what is and what isn't a fact. They argue about right and wrong and how you decide which is which.

But if an argument reaches a point where it's just a question of whether 4 is greater than 3, it's over.

There is something quite natural about the approach you took. I think for a lot of people, the argument for the existence of God has just one step:
(1) All this must have come from somewhere.
(2) God.
Your attempt to combine the cosmological and ontological proofs fills in some steps. It might be worth figuring out why that made it harder to get from (1) to (2).

One thing I find curious is the near universal acceptance of mathematics.

You can, of course, fake data, misrepresent data, tendentiously interpret data, and so on, and you can accuse someone you disagree with of the same, but there's no room for someone to say baldly, "In my view, 3 is greater than 4."

Whatever this is, it no longer looks much like a proof of the existence of God.

This is good stuff, Andrew. It's good to hear the thoughts of someone in the data trenches. I have a few more questions though.

I think there was a bit of special pleading in the influenza example. There's a "usually" thrown in with the predictive version that the causal version doesn't have. Surely the user of causal talk could be just as modest.

That "usually" made me wonder if we shouldn't try to separate the unpredictability of what we're talking about from the imperfection of our understanding of it. I had wanted to say there's a difference between saying, "Influenza is usually accompanied by fever, but we have no idea why," and saying, " Influenza is usually accompanied by fever, because [details]." But the "usually" itself could mean, "We don't know why it happens sometimes but not others," or it could mean, "There is some randomness to the way this process works, such that [details]." It seems worthwhile to keep those separate.

I just keep thinking that once you've given up this one big distinction, at least as an ideal to strive for, that all sorts of other meaningful distinctions will fall away too. I really like distinctions.

I don't have a horse in this race, Tim, and there is a certain sort of relativism I find worrisome, but I think we often have more to worry about from the absolutists. An ideology that is held to be above question can justify the most barbarous acts.

My point is that we don't need a notion of causality to obtain that understanding. Of course we can label the mechanism 'causality' if we want. But that does nothing other than add a superfluous label to a concept that was already perfectly clear. — andrewk

One use of the concept, though, is to help us weed out spurious correlations.

Mind. Blown.

Actually I just assumed that "Share" would bring up a selection of social media buttons like it does on loads of other sites, so I avoided clicking it.

Thanks also @Agustino. I guess that amounts to a sort of "back to the top of this post" function. Odd.

Thanks guys!

Along with reply, share, and flag, posts should have a link button, so you can refer to specific posts.

So two examples: consciousness and pharmaceuticals.

As for the second, I would have guessed that if you asked most researchers, they assume there is always some definite mechanism at work, but we just don't know it is. There are practical challenges to figuring out what those mechanisms are (the complexity of the systems at work, the limits of our current technology, etc.) but does anyone think there's just nothing there to know? That correlation, and that at a pretty coarse level, is the best we'll ever be able to do?

I've got nothing for you on consciousness, but I wonder if you should give it so much weight. Consciousness is some pretty weird shit, as the natural world goes, isn't it? Hard cases make bad law.

So does your thesis of "conservation of properties," if we're calling it that, come down to a restatement of the first law of thermodynamics (with a nod to the second), once you've reduced everything to matter and energy? What does the argument look like stated in those terms?

You also mentioned genes, so there's an issue about information...

Okay. I thought you had been saying energy transfer is not causal.

Sorry--I was unclear.

In the typewriter example, there's no causal connection between what I do and what the typewriter does, right?

Is there any place in this description for the word "cause"?

Okay. So how do you see the connection between what I did and what the computer did? (Still just clarifying here, not arguing.)

I think the natural ground to look at is communication, since the relativist and friend are talking to each other, understanding each other's assertions, and so on. The question is how much mileage you can get out of that. It might be a lot.

I'm not quite convinced. Do we retreat to predictive talk just because of the difficulty of adequately specifying the ceteris paribus conditions in causal talk?

I expect many people believe that pressing the 'A' key should cause an 'A' to appear on screen, if everything works the way it's supposed to, but they know perfectly well that there are many things that can go wrong between keyboard and screen. Even a typical causal claim might involve a prediction that conditions will be normal, in some sense that may be difficult or even impossible to define.

You could then just absorb the causal claim into the predictive claim, but they are fundamentally different aren't they? Or are they?

I just caused that sentence to exist. It has the property of being composed of words; I am not composed of words. — Srap Tasmaner

Still an incorrect causal relationship. The words have a physical property (say pixels on the screen), and a meaning. The meaning of the words is caused by you directly, and they are also a property of you because you can think (i.e. you meant what you wrote). You are not composed of pixels, but the direct cause of the pixels is the computer, which has the ability to create these pixels. — Samuel Lacrampe

Just to be absolutely clear, you're saying that
(1) I created the meaning of the sentence, but
(2) the computer created what's usually called the "inscription" of it, the physical instance,
and
(1a) I was able to create that sentence-meaning because I can think (thank you), and
(2a) the computer is able to create the physical inscription of the sentence.

It's not my intention to hold you to details of the formulations given here. (Also not my intention to get into details about the example itself, about what a sentence meaning is, etc.) Just want to be clear what you're saying.

You also make the additional claim, I think, that
(3) I did not create the inscription, because
(3a) I can't.

Is that the gist of it? Change anything you like in the wording.

Yes. What you got from Hume, as summarized here, doesn't support the conclusion you draw, namely that everything we can conceive of must exist. (Hume didn't draw this further conclusion either, for what that's worth.)

Hume claims that
(1) any complex thing we can imagine is built up out of simple things, and
(2) any simple thing we can imagine is directly derived from our experience, as a faint copy, in fact.

If you accept these claims, you will reason thus:
(1) if I imagine something complex, then what I imagine has simple components;
(2) the simple components of what I imagine must be derived from my experience.

Hume doesn't suggest that the gold mountain we imagine must be real, only that we must have experience of gold and mountains.

Makes sense to me.

To send the PM somewhat anonymously you'd also have to create a shared mod account.

No, there's no notification. If there was an option for automatic notification, then we'd consider doing that, but we don't have that option. — Sapientia

Maybe it's rare enough the mods could just have a policy of sending the deletee a PM.

OTOH, that would probably invite debate, and a further policy like "We won't respond to PMs about post deletion" has an icky ring to it.

Erk.

Yeah but then there's lying. I think there were claims about military service that were demonstrably false. He may have done it just to mess with people he didn't respect, I don't remember.

One of Faulkner's hobbies was lying about his past, as I recall.

Though the details have changed, concern about the effect of modern civilization on our world has been around a while. When I was kid, the concern was pollution. (I looked it up--the "crying Indian" PSA was 1971.)

So there's continuity there, but also difference. There was this sense 40 years ago that we could (a) stop messing up the planet, and (b) clean it up. Now we know that (a) is a lot harder because it's not littering or the occasional bad actor illegally dumping toxic waste that's the problem, it's the fundamental driver of modern civilization, i.e., burning fossil fuels. And it turns out (b) might not be an option, if we can cause permanent, irreversible damage.

So in a way an environmental activist from 40 years ago could say now "I told you so," but in another way they were probably wrong at the time about the two most important points. Talking about the future is almost always like that--even when you're right, you're wrong.

It's as if you derived Fx and derived Gx, then used &-introduction to get (Fx & Gx), and then told us that you could prove Fx from (Fx & Gx). You can infer Fx from (Fx & Gx), sure. That's just &-elimination. But you could only truly assert (Fx & Gx) in the first place because you could already truly assert Fx and you could already truly assert Gx. Do you see the difference?

You're missing the point.

You have claimed that "one truth about x proves x exists," and given a reconstruction of the cogito along these lines.

Presumably if you are trying to prove x exists, you don't know yet. In particular, you don't know yet whether the expression "x" refers. Your method was supposed to show that "x" refers. (Because it is true that Descartes is thinking, Descartes exists.)

If you must already know that the expression "x" has a reference (the object x) in order to know that "Fx" is true for some F or other, then you are not proving x exists, you are presupposing it.

Of course you can infer from the truth of "Ga" that G is a real predicate and a is an existing individual. But that's not proving anything. You already knew all of that.

I summon Hume's principle that there are no innate ideas, that all conceptions must come from experience; and thus anything that we can conceive must exist at some point. This does not mean that just because I can imagine a unicorn, that unicorns exist, but that the basic components of the unicorn (colours, shapes, sounds, ...) must exist. — Samuel Lacrampe

I have been unable to find a source for the clause beginning "thus." I don't think Hume says anything like this, and it clearly does not follow from the summary of Hume's view of the imagination that you've presented. If you want to keep relying on this idea, you'll need to argue for it without Hume's help.

Maybe you could give me an example of an object causing another to exist, so I know what you mean. — Srap Tasmaner

Nevermind, I've got it.

I just caused that sentence to exist. It has the property of being composed of words; I am not composed of words.

If it is true that unicorns have four legs then unicorns exist.
Truth is that which can be shown to be the case.
To show that 'Unicorns have four legs' is true, we need to verify it.
Verification requires the existence of unicorns and unicorn legs.

One truth about x proves x exists. ..where x is the subject of the truth. — Owen

Suppose I claim there is a smallest positive real number, call it k.

It's easily proven that k < 1, right?

Does that prove that there is a smallest positive real number?

Using the law of noncontradiction, either a thing has a cause or not. This is true regardless if the thing is observable or not, because the law of noncontradiction is an absolute. — Samuel Lacrampe

The law of contradiction would say, roughly, that nothing is both caused and uncaused. You're using the law of the excluded middle. I know it might seem like they're the same thing but they're not.

I think we would get too far into the weeds going through this here, but here's a quote from Michael Dummett that should give you some idea what I have in mind:

Unless we have a means which would in principle decide the truth-value of a given statement, we do not have for it a notion of truth and falsity which would entitle us to say that it must be true or false.

So you should at least be aware that there are philosophers who have qualms about drawing "logical" conclusions about matters we can in principle know nothing about.

Maybe you could give me an example of an object causing another to exist, so I know what you mean.

let's provisionally accept that the statement 'no effect has a property not possessed by its cause' is not patently false, until either a clear exception arises, or a flaw is found in the reasoning of the original argument here. — Samuel Lacrampe

I'm still in the "patently false" camp.

Not according to Quine.

While it may be hard to pronounce, the argument is really a simple syllogism in the form:
If A is B, and B is C, then A is C.
- Replace A with 'all that can exist'
- Replace B with 'anything that we can conceive'
- Replace C with 'anything that must exist' — Samuel Lacrampe

We can clean this up, even without resorting to quantified modal logic, into an actual Barbara like so:

Everything that can exist can be conceived of.
Everything that can be conceived of must exist.
$\therefore$ Everything that can exist must exist.

Remember universals are really conditionals:

If something can exist, then it can be conceived of.
If something can be conceived of, then it must exist.
$\therefore$ If something can exist, then it must exist.

See how the second premise is not what you were trying to use Hume for?

Even S5 only says that anything that is possible is necessarily possible (IIRC), not that anything possible is necessary.

(I think someone, maybe Alvin Plantinga, has argued that if God is possible then he must exist--that his existence in some possible world would be necessary in that world, and that if he's necessary in that possible world then he's necessary in all of them, and therefore he exists. It was something like that.)

I don't know what to say about the event vs. object stuff. Causation between objects--or all this talk about objects having or not having a cause, which even I fell into--it doesn't make any sense to me. I'll stick with events.

we cannot say that 'everything has a cause', only that 'everything that we can observe (the natural universe) has a cause'. — Samuel Lacrampe

Sure, so long as you understand that now you're not saying anything about what's in the natural universe--your predicate is coextensive with it.

But the law of non-contradiction is an absolute. — Samuel Lacrampe

Not what I'm talking about. Bivalence is different. We do not have to accept that "has a cause" is either true or false of entities that are in principle unobservable.

Actually, I don't think that 'everything has a cause'. Only that 'everything in the natural universe has a cause'. There is no need to extend the principle further than the data set that we can observe, which is only the natural universe. — Samuel Lacrampe

You know you just emptied the predicate "has a cause" of all content by extending it to everything, right?

Logically, either a thing has a cause or else it is an eternal being which has always existed, — Samuel Lacrampe

Some of us are going to balk at extending the principle of bivalence to propositions that, as you just told us, are in principle unverifiable. I might.