:rofl: Apparently you are stupid, gullible, confirmation-biased or paranoid enough to think I was serious.

Well, hopefully those same Americans will apply the same logic to vaccination. In New South Wales we are up around 90% first dose and still rising, so it looks like the recalcitrants will be somewhat less than 10%.

You’re only characterising it that way. For me what it comes down to is this: your house is not built on rock; accept that you might be wrong and leave people alone. — AJJ

That's what I said; I'm going to leave them alone. But it's not a matter of me possibly being wrong. There's a larger than zero chance that the advice of the experts that is determining the strategy of vaccination being adopted by virtually every country in the world is wrong, but that is not the point. If you are at war, there is a chance that the General's strategy is wrong; from that it does not follow that soldiers should start arguing against the strategy, refusing to follow orders or deserting, because the battle will be lost if enough soldiers were to follow this course.

And it doesn't matter if you don't believe this situation is an emergency or amounts to war. Because the majority do think that, rightly or wrongly, and if the current strategy of vaccination were to fail it would have disastrous consequences for everyone, including you.

all of experts end up recommending vaccinations, stressing their importance. This should tell you something. — Xtrix

NO, no, no... the experts are just toeing the line because they're all afraid of losing their jobs or their research grants. :wink: :roll:

We are dependent on community in far more than merely a "symbolic manner". A democratic state is the result of the choices of the community. The democratic notion of support for individual rights has to be balanced against the harms that individuals exercising their freedoms do to others and to the community as a whole.

You're indulging in all or nothing thinking if you believe that the state serves only corporate interests. The state may be more beholden to corporate interests than it should be; obviously the state is never perfect and where there are human beings there will inevitably be some degree of corruption.

Your second paragraph as I read it is alarmist nonsense; you can do better than indulging in that. The question is: if you see injustices and corruption in your community, in your state, and they really bother you, then what are you doing to try to help the situation? Whining about it and petulantly refusing to do a simple thing which carries little risk to yourself will only make the situation worse. So are you happy to become part of the problem?

What you really can't do, I think, is say, here are the reasons I found persuasive but I don't 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. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that's precisely the hypocrisy of that position. For my part the double standard and facile rationalizations make it not even worth responding to any more. A certain kind of mentality aint never gonna change.

Yes, I would think this is non controversial. I was just trying to write it down somewhere, not restart the debate. — Olivier5

Right, but oddly I believe it is still controversial, at least in certain circles. Perhaps that's a testament to how it is possible to become confused by predicate logic in ways that you wouldn't if you thought in plain langauge.

Yes, I made pretty much the same objections to it in the other thread.

So, within human experience, it makes no sense to say that a proposition no one knows about is true. The proposition needs to exist first. Once it is proposed, then and only then can the question of its truth be asked, and thus be put into existence, and only then, can the question be answered (or not). — Olivier5

I agree it makes no sense to say that a proposition about something unknown is true; the most that can be said is that it could be true.

My point is just that the feelings elicited by a poem are ultimately private, like sensation. — Janus


I didn't say sensations are not shared, though. — Janus


Think that's enough. Cheers. — Banno

As I said they can be shared in type if not in token; and also that they can be shared does not entail that they will be. A congenitally blind person cannot share your experience of seeing anything; they don't know what you are referring to when you speak of the flashing lime-green leaves. So there be no contradiction lurking there.

But if you're done. you're done I guess; no problem from my side.

It seems to me that you are in the untenable position of insisting that sensations are both not shared and yet the commonality on which talk of sensations is based. — Banno

I didn't say sensations are not shared, though. I said the opposite; that they are common, in kind if not in token, and that people need to have experienced them in order to know what the words that refer to them mean. They also need to have seen and understood the behavior of others who profess to be having those sensations.

Experiencing the sensation is one half of the equation and witnessing the behavior of others who are experiencing the sensation is the other half; so meaning has it's genesis in both private and public dimensions of experience. I can't understand why you want to eliminate the private dimension of experience, when it is obviously not irrelevant to the understanding of meanings.

One would think that if the vaccines are so safe and effective as the government loves to say that they are that the government would put their money where their mouth is and boldly declare to pay restitution for anyone damaged by the vaccine (resting safely in the assumption that it will never actually come to that, given that the vaccines are so safe and effective). — baker

If the government declares something to be mandatory tout court it doesn't follow that they will be legally responsible to pay compensation in the unlikely event that something goes wrong. Sometimes seat belts cause terrible injuries for example. Seat belts are mandatory here is Australia, and that is only to protect oneself. If vaccines were made mandatory that would be to protect oneself and others.

If vaccination is provisionally mandatory (if you what a certain job, or you want to do certain things) then the individual still has a choice; but they will have to be prepared to wear the consequences. Also the advice has never been that the vaccines are 100% percent safe and effective, so it is acknowledged that there is always a risk involved in being vaccinated from covid. This is so with all other vaccines and common medications: the rare case of adverse reaction, even death, is always possible.

Suppose you are right. Then those feelings and sensations are private. There is therefore, by your own argument, no way we can ensure that we are talking about the same thing when we use the word "pain" or "Loneliness".

No? — Banno

I think we can know that we are talking about the same feelings, or kinds of feelings, but we cannot know that the feelings will be exactly the same for each of us, or even exactly the same at the different times we experience them.

But the same applies to objects in our common world. We have no way of knowing whether the table looks exactly the same to each of us.

I don't think we can, and nor do we need to, "ensure" anything. We all seem to know what we are speaking about when it comes to words that refer to common human feelings. And I would say that those of us who actually experience those feelings really do know what we are talking about, whereas those who don't experience them, not so much.

See those words, again?

Not all words are nouns. But further, that the noun is used does not imply that the thing named exists.

That's the essential observation that seems not to be present in your thinking. — Banno

The words we have been considering: 'pain', and the example I used last 'loneliness' are both nouns. There are many other nouns like those that denote feelings: 'fear', 'anger', 'timidity', 'love', 'hate', 'desire', 'disgust', and so on. What those words signify are not objects, but they exist as feelings; so I'm not seeing any substance to your objection.

The replies are
1. We agree that the grammar of talk of pain is superficially the same as that of other object - hence the example that "I have a phone in my hand " and "I have a pain in my hand". The cogent difference is exactly "the fact that my headache is not an object in the external world which can be pointed at". — Banno

As you know I have acknowledged that difference, but I think we differ when it comes to what each of us believe follows from that difference.

2. If the account in (1) is correct, it's not just folk who have not felt pain who do not refer to it; rather, we all express pain. But further, the blind rugby player mentioned above might not share in the experience of seeing, but can kick goals, with all that involves; and so it's not shared experience that counts, but being in a shared world.

I agree with that too, but I think there are different contexts within, and degrees to which, our experiences of that shared world can themselves be shared. The situation is not simple and monolithic, it is diverse and complex, in my view.

3. Arguably Wittgenstein's purpose was to dissuade philosophers from arguing in terms of words having meanings, especially if they are considered some sort of mental furniture. The admonition is to look at use in the place of meaning.

To say meaning is use is simplistic I agree. Meaning is given and indicated by use, just as use determines the definitions of words that are given in a dictionary. Personal meanings or variations on meanings, if you prefer, are the sets of associations unique to individuals. I wouldn't call that "mental furniture" because it is dynamic and ever-changing. I still maintain that if someone has not experienced what a word commonly signifies, then they will not understand what the word refers to, even if they might appear to be able to use the word correctly. If someone has never felt lonely, for example, they will not be able to use the sentence "I feel lonely" authentically, because they don't really know what 'lonely' means.

But people generally do have an overwhelming and insurmountable fear and distrust of being abused and taken advantage of. They're just not always able to put it into exact words. — baker

Sure, but I don't see how it would be reasonable to claim that anyone is being abused and taken advantage of in the current covid situation.

No, this is taking the discussion in the wrong direction.

There actually exist laws about issues of public health. The matter is largely settled, legally.

What is not legally settled are things specifically pertaining to covid, with its specifics. But many people act as if this was settled. — baker

We disagree right here. The public health advice being acted on now does not contravene the "largely settled" "laws about issues of public health".

Also, I think there is an ethical side to this as well, as I said in the post above.

The "specifics of covid" are a moving feast and to an ever-diminishing degree remain to be seen.

I don't agree that any decisions should be made without considering others, without considering the community as a whole, because we all are dependent on the state in so many ways. Or if you prefer a less impersonal framing, we are all dependent on the community, and I think we owe it our allegiance to the utmost degree we can manage, especially in times of crisis, because those times are the times solidarity is most needed.

It's because you can refer to a single tree that you can refer to trees in general. — Banno

It's because I can refer to single instances of pain "This headache is killing me" that I can refer to pain in general. I don't see a cogent difference other than the fact that my headache is not an object in the external world which can be pointed at. Or if I said "The headache I had the other day was severe" you could reply " Is it the headache you had yesterday you are referring to or the one you had last week". To my way of thinking that is a perfectly valid usage of 'refer'

In any case I'm not really arguing about the coherence of various usages of 'refer'. I have been saying that if you had never felt pain, you would not know what the term is intended by the speaker to refer to. This would be the same as if you had never seen a tree.

I don't hold Wittgenstein to be a sage, by the way. If meaning is use, it's even possible that usages have changed somewhat since his time. In any case I do think it is wrongheaded to say that there can be no reference to pain, even though that is not what I have been focusing on. I'm not trying to be difficult, rather I'm just trying to communicate what seems to make sense to me.

It depends on what you mean by 'refer'. If referring is understood by analogy to pointing, then pain-talk doesn't refer because others cannot see what i am referring to. So, perhaps it could be said that pain-talk cannot refer to a token but only to a type.

If I talk about a particular tree then I am referring to that tree; would you say I am referring to anything if I were to talk about trees in general?

I haven't argued against that conclusion, though. My argument has only been that when it comes to language that talks about sensations, our paradigm case being pain, the private experience is an essential part of mutual understanding. A person who has never felt pain does not know what the word refers to; the closest they could get would be to think it referred to pain-behavior. If you have felt pain, then when I speak to you of pain, you know what I am talking about because you know what pain feels like.

Cf. Emerson on consistency. Or for Harry's sake:
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. ” — tim wood

I know this is from quite a while ago; The Trump thread appeared on the first page and I wondered why people would still be posting on it. When I opened the thread this was the first thing I saw. I am familiar with the first sentence of this quote from Emerson. " A foolish consistency"; I have always wondered about what is meant, about what would make consistency foolish. Pedantry perhaps?

The second sentence speaks of consistency as such, no "foolish" qualifier. Should we tale Emerson seriously here; is it OK to be inconsistent in your thoughts, opinions and beliefs? If Emerson really thought that, then he might have been a precursor and role-model for Trump (albeit far more brilliant), to bring this thread back to its topic.

What might a valid exemption be anyway? — jorndoe

Allergy to the vaccines I guess. I don't think conscientious objection will cut it. If someone who has a phobia about injecting anything at all into themselves, would that count as grounds for exemption? Would natural immunity from prior infection count? If someone is paranoid and has an overwhelming and insurmountable fear and distrust of the vaccine would that count? I don't know really.

I support and respect their right to choose for themselves. — Merkwurdichliebe

Where we may disagree here is that choices are never just for the self.

Maybe he's one of those who are able to use echolocation to "see" what is around them.

:up: Pure rationality is nothing more than consistency of thought; it cannot tell us what to think. What to think is motivated by what we care about, and what we should care about (on account of being social beings) should inform practical rationality or what Aristotle referred to as "phronesis".

You take yourself very seriously, that's for sure, and you're a hero in your own mind, but to me you're just another coward running away from a needle, and rationalizing his fears. — Olivier5

To be fair to @Baker, she has been vaccinated.

is an individual reaction; but it is not private - after all, you just shared it. — Banno

Sure, but unless you have experienced something like it, you would not have any substantive idea of what I'm talking about. Say you have never visualized anything, your mind just doesn't work that way. Just like the example I gave earlier of someone who has never experienced pain, or the blind person who has never seen anything. So, it's public because it's expressed in a public language, but it's not all public because its communication depends on some commonality of experience which may not always be in play.

Poetry succeeded in virtue of the shared world of poet and reader. Poetry is not private. — Banno

I do agree that poetry as an institution or cultural phenomenon is public. So, perhaps I should have said that the feelings elicited by a poem may be ultimately private, not they necessarily are.

Think on that. The implication is that the reader's response is unrelated to what the poet writes.

In which case it does not matter what the poet writes. — Banno

It may well be that the reader's response is quite unrelated to what the poet felt or had in mind. It is the words themselves and their range of possible associations which do have some say in the reader's response. But who knows how wacky and unrelated to any 'normal' response some readers' responses might be?

I don't know if many people experience this, but when I am reading philosophical works I sometimes find myself visualizing some scene from my childhood, like the backyard of the girl who lived across the road, or the stretch of bush that ran from the back of my grandmother's house to my parent's house. Sometimes it's like the images in dream which don't make any describable sense. This only happens with philosophical works, possibly because they are not describing anything concrete that can be visualized. It's a very strange stream of images and feelings going on in the background.

From what I have heard there are already people getting exemption certificates from doctors and a market in fake vaccine certificates.

So drop truth, as such, from the lexicon, going straight to belief, with three values, true, false and undecided. Logic and mathematics are down as true. Add whatever institutional statements you like - bishops move only diagonally, making a promise counts as undertaking a commitment, whatever you need. Other statements are undecided. Then add observations and associated theory in some sort of holistic verification model as per Quine... — Banno

You might be able to find a way to make that consistent, I suppose, but would it follow that it is correct or maximally adequate to human experience and logic?

I mean, in one sense unknown truths can mean little to us, just because they are unknown, but the existence of unknown truths seems indispensable to the logic involved in understanding ourselves as knowers of things, particularly regarding the possibility that what we take to be known may not be.

No they are not. We share them; if it were not so then the poet could have no say in the responses of their readers. One's reaction to a poem is not arbitrary. — Banno

The poet does not have any say in the responses of the reader. Given that language has conventional associations there may indeed be limits to the range of feelings that might be elicited by a poem, of course.

But now we are back to the same examples, and the presumption that there is a thing that is the pain, a thing that is what it is like to see; and this is the error Wittgenstein is dismissing. The pain is not located in your head, rather it is the head that pains. There is not a thing the blind person cannot do, rather there are things they cannot say. — Banno

This is all just reads like idiosyncratic assertion to me. I find the suggestion that there is a difference between saying that a pain is in your head and that it is the head that pains absurd, or that there is not something, namely seeing, that the blind person cannot do. It makes me wonder what planet you've been living, on to be honest. It's like you are wanting to force reality to accord with your stipulations.

Isn't the point of poetry to explicate the inexpressible? Yet poetry is not private. No precise meaning can be determined because there is no precise meaning, only the use - in this case, the elicitation of feelings... — Banno

I would say 'express' or 'evoke' rather than explicate. My point is just that the feelings elicited by a poem are ultimately private, like sensation. Of course we all have feelings and we all have sensations, and in that sense some sharing is of course possible.

A good example is headache; I sometimes have one, and my friend has never had one. So when I tell her I have a headache, she can understand that the pain is located in my head, but she has no idea what it is to have a headache, just as I really have no really concrete idea what it is to give birth. The usual extreme example is that a person blind from birth has no idea what it is to see. Some people have a genetic abnormality that stops them from being able to feel pain at all. Because they have never experienced pain, they cannot know what 'pain' refers to, because it doesn't really refer to manifest behavior.

A fact is then any statement that has been assigned the value "true".

The criticisms I levelled at Olivier target observation, not verification per se. — Banno

It's not clear to me what distinction you are making between observation and verification. In the context of science and the everyday there are countless facts that have been observed or measured, and on the strength of those observations and/ or measurements they are verified. Theories are never verified though, beyond that their predictions have been observed to obtain.

And facts are always contextual, of course. The fact that water has been observed to consistently boil at 100 degrees Celsius is subject to some conditions. For example is the water distilled or does it contain minerals, are we boiling the water at sea level? And so on. That Paris is the capital of France is not so much an observable fact but is true by convention or definition.

So, the fact that water boils at 100 degrees remains true unless the laws of nature change, and the fact that Paris is the capital of France remains true unless some other new capital is declared. That water did reliably boil at 100 degrees in certain "normal" conditions, and that France was the capital remain facts in any case.

Of course they can. And if it does nothing, then like the beetle it drops out of the discussion. The utterance would be senseless. And if it does something, that something is shared. — Banno

I agree that if the precise meaning of some imaginative construction could not be explained to others it would be senseless,in a sense. It would nonetheless be meaningful to the poet in the sense of evoking feelings that cannot be explicated. This is true of many poetical works; no precise meaning can be determined; the words are meant to allude and evoke some indeterminate feeling Try explaining what Joyce is saying in Finnegan's Wake.

Of course what you say is true of propositional language, but that is only one dimension of what we do with language.

"A fact is what is set out by a true statement" sets up a realist agenda. The fact exists independently of the statement. Here one might avoid Fitch by pointing out that there are things we do not know, and moreover, there are things we cannot know. — Banno

I agree with you that there are things we do not know, and things we cannot know. I think I've indicated that amply in my exchanges with @Olivier5. One example I've given is that there are countless details of history we cannot know simply because they are past. But there is a distinction between what we can actually know (due to our place in spacetime) and what is knowable in principle. I think you would agree that all facts or truths are knowable in principle.

So, it wasn't clear to me what Fitch has in mind. Do you take Fitch to be saying that there are unknown truths, but that all truths are knowable in principle, or that all truths are actually knowable?

It is not a pedantic matter of "either/ or"... — Janus

Indeed, since in the end it is all public. — Banno

To say it is all public is as pedantic as to say it is all private. To put it another way, it is just your preferred interpretation of the situation; other interpretations are possible and equally as valid from their standpoints.

Obviously language originates in a communal context. But each individual can do with it whatever they wish within the range of their imaginations. Think Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

It's always a matter of life and death anyway. Where some people go wrong is in assuming that this covid crisis is something special, rare, extraordinary. — baker

I don't agree with this because pandemics which threaten to overwhelm medical resources are rare and extraordinary. And even if only in terms of the fear the pandemic engenders it is rare and extraordinary and would threaten our economies even if there were no lock-downs, because if thousands of people were dying and medical resources overwhelmed people would lock themselves down out of fear

I don't see what the supposition that there are truths we could not possibly know even in principle (a supposition I don't make) has to do with my criticism of Fitch's (supposed) Paradox.

As I said before, I’m guiltily aware of that when super-market shopping. As it happens, I’m selling up and tree-changing over the next 6 months, it might be an opportunity to actually try and realise some of these ideas. — Wayfarer

:up: Good move!

It seems the issues with nitrogenous and phosphoric fertilizers, which are indispensable to feeding nearly half of the world's present population are not confined to destruction of soils, but also have implications for global warming. Another issue is irrigation which leads to soil salination. Those implications need to be taken into account when estimating how many people the Earth can sustainably support.

“Foraging practiced by early gatherers and hunters could support as few as 0.0001 people per hectare of land and typical rates in more hospitable environments were around 0.002 people / ha . Shifting agriculture elevated that density by up to two orders of magnitude to 0.2 – 0.5 people / hectare ; the first societies practicing permanent agriculture ( Mesopotamia , Egypt , China ) raised it to 1 person / hectare . The best 19th - century traditional farming in such intensively cultivated places as southern China could support as many as five people / hectare while modern farming can feed more than 10 people / hectare and it does so by providing a much better average - quality diet than did the previous arrangements ( Smil 2017a ).”

https://eyeson.earth/blog-ii/2020/2/12/growth-by-vaclav-smil

In recent years concern has grown over the contribution of nitrogen (N) fertilizers to the environmental problems of nitrate pollution of waters and the pollution of the atmosphere with nitrous oxide, other oxides of nitrogen, and ammonia. These gases potentially contribute to the ‘greenhouse effect’ or global heating because of their increasing concentrations in the atmosphere and to the destruction of the stratospheric ozone layer, which protects the earth from ultraviolet radiation.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01048758

So, how many people does synthetic nitrogen fertilizer actually feed? Below we draw upon several published estimates, which tend to converge on a similar share of the global population. Results published by Erisman et al. (2012) in the scientific magazine Nature are shown in the chart.7

These results also tie closely with Vaclav Smil’s widely-quoted estimates, which we discuss later.8

In the chart we see the actual global population trend in blue — growing from around 1.65 billion in 1900 to almost 7.4 billion in 2015.
The line in grey represents estimates of the number of people fed by synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. As we see, nitrogen fertilizers only became available following the commercialization of the Haber-Bosch process from 1910 onwards. Since then, Erisman et al. estimate it has supported 42 percent of global births over the past century. This amounts to 44 percent of the global population in 2000 being fed by nitrogen fertilizers, rising to 48 percent in 2008. Here we have extended this estimate to 2015 with the continuation of the assumption that 48 percent of the global population are fed by nitrogen fertilizers. Since the share supported by the process continues to rise, this may in fact be a conservative estimate. This means that in 2015, nitrogen fertilizers supported 3.5 billion people that otherwise would have died.
The red line represents the size of the global population which would therefore be supported without the use of nitrogenous fertilizers. This is shown simply as the actual population minus the number of people reliant on them for food production. Without this innovation, global population may have been reduced to only 3.5 to 4 billion people.

https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-people-does-synthetic-fertilizer-feed