SophistiCat: I believe in the Golden Rule - do to others as you would have them do to you.

Janus: That's bullshit. You beat your kids, treat your employees like crap, and cheat your customers.

Is that a legitimate argument? — T Clark

I would say that the fact that someone who propounds a principle may not follow that principle says nothing about the principle and everything about them. So, if they claim to believe in a principle that they apparently make no effort to practice then their claim to believe in the principle may indeed be bullshit, but not necessarily so.

Saying that an argument is vacuous characterizes an argument, not a person, so this wouldn't be ad hominem. — SophistiCat

Sure, but that wasn't what I intended to say as I already explained. I explained that I meant to say that if you claim their arguments are vacuous because they, as people, are whatever, that is no different
than saying they are not worth listening to..

On the contrary, It's only a fallacy if your intention is to explain what is wrong with the argument. The way you phrased it here would be an ad hominem, because you are judging an argument on the basis of the character of the person who put it forward. If you decline to engage with the argument, then you cannot be committing a fallacy. You cannot break any rules if you aren't playing to begin with — SophistiCat

So, claiming that all someones arguments are vacuous of fallacious on account of what kind of person they are would be an ad hominem even if you don't bother to apply that "criteria" to any of their actual arguments.

The credibility and basis of knowledge of members is sometimes an issue. — T Clark

Sure, you might conclude that someone is an idiot on account of their constantly presenting invalid arguments and/ or baseless claims. That may or may not be a reasonable conclusion, but at least it would be based on examination of their arguments, and not on their religion or politics or facility with language.

What's the difference between saying that someone is not worth listening to, and saying that their arguments are vacuous, and thus refuted? — Janus

Do you mean invalid or unsound, or in fact vacuous?

If the latter, then your pair above means roughly the same. — baker

If their arguments are vacuous then they would be invalid and or unsound no? I think the point about the ad hominem fallacy is that it consists in assuming that someone's arguments are invalid or unsound or vacuous without examining their actual arguments.

:up:

What's the difference between saying that someone is not worth listening to, and saying that their arguments are vacuous, and thus refuted? — Janus


Saying that an argument is vacuous characterizes an argument, not a person, so this wouldn't be ad hominem. — SophistiCat

It was badly expressed; and I omitted some detail. What I meant to say was that claiming that someone's arguments are vacuous because the person is an idiot, not sufficiently educated, right wing, an anti-semite, racist or whatever reason other than explaining what is wrong with their actual arguments, is no different than saying that someone is simply not worth listening to. Either way, that just is the ad hominem fallacy.

Dr. Baker: Mr. Clark, you have an inflamed spleen. I recommend you take this medication once a day till it resolves itself.

Mr. Clark: I'd like to see your med school diploma please. — T Clark

This is an inappropriate example. Of course a person's expertise is an important factor in any decision as to whether to listen to their purportedly expert advice. But the ad hominem fallacy is usually committed in contexts where there is no definable of certifiable expertise, or at least not the kind of expertise which guarantees or at least produces tendencies towards consensus of opinion. Philosophy is such an enterprise. An example of the ad hominem fallacy would be saying that if Heidegger was a Nazi, then he could not have said anything philosophically important or interesting.

Oh, I like that. Yours? — Mww

As far as I know it is. I googled it and could not find it anywhere.

Perception informs of a general affect on sense, sensation informs which sense is affected. Both of which are sufficient for being aware of the presence of objects. But neither tells us what is affecting, nothing is yet being constructed, conceptually nor intuitively. The cognitive system that does the constructing, is not yet in play.

From the physical point of view, all that is between the external world out there, and the brain in here. The eyes, ears, skin, etc., don’t tell us anything at all about what is affecting them, only that there is something. — Mww

I count perception as the act or process of something being perceived. So, for me it is a cognitive act. "No perception without conception (however minimal)". We always see something, hear something, feel something, smell something, taste something and so on, and for me, we do not have to know exactly what that something is in order for a sensory process to count as perception. A sensory process (the affect of an organ of sense by light, sound, or molecule) of which we are totally unaware I would not count as perception.

But I guess this is a matter of definition. I would say that definitional differences or distinctions all carry their own suite of presuppositions, though.

I can see the legitimacy of saying we sense phenomena, in effect, that’s exactly what we do. But I do not grant legitimacy to the notion that phenomena are sensations. Phenomena are that to which the sensations belong, not that that’s what they are. — Mww

I would not say that phenomena are sensation either, but that they are what impinges on. or affects, the senses. I see this as being prior to perception; and would say that once we have perceived something it has become an object; something more than a mere phenomenon.

Of course these terms are somewhat plastic, though, so we each may have different takes on their definitions and ambits of application. It might be reasonable to say it's largely a matter of taste. :smile:

A hole is a boundary just as a surface is. So a hole, together with the surface of the object the hole is in, encloses or shapes part of an object: a body of water, or air, or slime.

If you said that bartricks was not worth listening to on account of him being an obnoxious dimwit, you would not committing an ad hominem fallacy - on the contrary, you would be very reasonable. You would be committing the fallacy if you said that batricks' argument was refuted on account of him being an obnoxious dimwit, but who ever does that? — SophistiCat

What's the difference between saying that someone is not worth listening to, and saying that their arguments are vacuous, and thus refuted?

Then you will be trod upon.
Just because philosophizers don't use AK 47s doesn't mean they aren't engaging in battle. — baker

You'll only be trod upon if you choose to engage in argument on their own terms with the tiny minority of self-important idiots who consider themselves to be philosophers.

Why do my beliefs need to be justified?

Who says they do? Do you think your beliefs need to be justified, and if so, who do you think they need to be justified to; to others or merely to yourself?

Hi, could either of you expound? Or provide a link to an appropriate SEP article? I don't think I'm familiar with this yet. — Benkei

I posted this in the "independent Existence" thread. Basically the same issue , so I copy it here:

I would count as an object of awareness or consciousness anything that stands out, whether that be a hole, a surface, a mountain, a tree, an animal, a thought, a feeling and so on endlessly. Ontological democracy and interdependence; the individual stands out but nothing stands alone.

Honestly I find myself becoming more and more a naive realist, but being surprised at what that really entails... — Moliere

Now, I'm moved to ask you for further exposition.

No, it isn’t any more conventional; it is nonetheless conventional. Unqualified, stand-alone objects, as such, are conventionally that which is in space and time. — Mww

I would count as an object of awareness or consciousness anything that stands out, whether that be a hole, a surface, a mountain, a tree, an animal,a thought, a feeling and so on endlessly. Ontological democracy and interdependence; the individual stands out but nothing stands alone.

Of course we call the objects presented to consciousness 'phenomena'. — Janus


I don’t. Objects aren’t presented to consciousness; phenomena are but phenomena aren’t objects. Objects are presented to sensibility....the faculties for physical impressions, the senses.

What I haven’t said anything about, the other half of it, is the a priori presentation to consciousness of mere conceptions, fully abstracted notions, ideas....the things we think but never perceive. — Mww

I would put it exactly the opposite way: what we sense are phenomena; light, texture, sound, taste, smell, mass, etc., and from that "buzzing, blooming confusion" we pick out objects by becoming aware of them. To be sure becoming aware of them does entail something of construction, but that process of conceptual construction is not, and cannot be, conscious.

"Conceptions, fully abstracted notions, ideas" are not "things we think but never perceive", but simply another kind of phenomena we do perceive or more accurately enact in the act of thinking ( if it is a conscious act, at least). So, that enaction may be either conscious or unconscious (subconscious).

Of course we call the objects presented to consciousness 'phenomena'. You haven't said anything about what is left out.

Also the formulation 'objects presented to consciousness' is not any more conventional than any other; they all have a long history.

You can’t have a hole that exists on its own, whereas you can have an object that exists on its own. — Wayfarer

Objects do not exist "on their own" any more than holes do. Naive realism.

The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.

To say that the empirical world is a creation of the understanding is an unfounded presumption: we don't know, beyond the current theory of genesis, how it came to be. We know that we apprehend it via consciousness, that is all.

Just as there may be naive realism, this is an example of naive idealism.Naivete in this context consists in thinking that we know what we don't know. Socrates warned against that failing nearly 2500 years ago, and many still have not learned the lesson.

Presentation of what, to what? — Mww

Presentation of objects to consciousness.

What is cognized is representation of that which is in the external world — Mww

Wouldn't it be more parsimonious (and more accurate and less misleading) to simply say that cognition is presentation?

The book of nature.

You can get national data over what you are looking for if you do some digging. — Christoffer

If you know that you must have already done the digging in which case you should be able to provide the links.

As to the WHO being a propaganda machine: if you think they have no vested interests, the least of which not being support of the pharmaceutical industry, and that they don't suppress information that threatens those interests, then you are simply naive in my view.

:smile: I'll take a look when I get more time Joshs...

No. They are saying that everything there is to know about the mind, can be known by way of the objective sciences. And that's all I have to say at this point, thanks for your responses. — Wayfarer

Everything that can be known about the brain ( at least about how it appears to us) can only be known by way of the objective sciences. We can know (directly in the sense of familiarity) our experiences, what we think and how we feel and so on, but that knowledge does not tell us anything about how they those experiences, thought and feelings came to be just as they appear to us to be.

I’m trying to tease out the contribution of the subject not just to the appearance of the object but to the essense of the object. — Joshs

You really can't because the contributions of subjects to the appearances of objects are pre-cognitive. Essence is just an idea.There is no essence beyond the idea of one, or at least if there were, we could never apprehend it without it becoming just another idea, or at least we could have no way of knowing that it was anything more than just an idea.

Knowledge is taken to consist in a faithful mirroring of a mind-independent reality. — Joshs

If knowledge is true (and if it is not then it is not knowledge at all) then it is a faithful mirroring of how things are presented to the community of inquirers. We can thus surmise that our knowledge grows out of our pre-cognitive interactions with the things in themselves, and such interactions count as mind-independent insofar as we cannot be aware of them at all.

So, I repeat that it is trivially true that all (apart from other animal) knowledge is human knowledge and thus cannot, by definition, be said to be independent of the human, and that there can be no absolute sentient being-independent knowledge; we are entitled, indeed bound, to say that much.

But they're still trying to eliminate something. What, pray tell? — Wayfarer

They are trying to eliminate the intuitive notions we have of consciousness and experience and subjectivity.

I think you are wrong about that. The eliminative materialists (for example, Chruchlands) say that consciousness and experience is not what we intuitively take it to be. They do not deny (how could they?) that all knowledge is knowledge had by subjects, even if they take those subjects to be wholly physical beings.

I think it's a priori. The skull is not transparent. The cornea is, and light strikes the receptors in the retina, but those stimuli are then interpreted - which is the point at issue. — Wayfarer

This is an empirical observation, not an a priori judgement.

Kant argues against Berkeley's idealism in which he agrees that there is indeed something beyond ideas themselves. But as I have already said, I don't agree that idealism means that 'the world is all in the mind'. What I'm arguing is that all knowledge of the world has an inextricably subjective component, which is not apparent in experience (as per Kant and Husserl) but without which knowledge is not possible.

Materialism and physicalism both overlook or ignore the irreducibly subjective nature of knowledge in that sense. — Wayfarer

I think this is a strawman. Of course all knowledge (ours at least) is human knowledge, and as such, is not independent of the human mind, or indeed, of the human body and its senses.

Berkeley argued that the world is in God's mind (any universal mind would do). Kant rejects this, and he does not posit a universal mind in which individual minds partake. Kant considers the appearances of things to be dependent on the human mind, but not things in themselves. What he says is that, although we can imagine that things in themselves are "something" we cannot imagine or understand what that something is, because any such imagination or understanding would not be (human) mind-independent. He rejects the traditional (and specifically Spinozistic) notion of the veracity of intellectual intution, and thus puts paid to traditional metaphysics.

So, in summary, it is trivially true that all knowledge of the world has an inextricably subjective component, and from that trivial truth no further knowledge may be gleaned.

Phenomenology argues that the subject is not separate from the object. — Joshs

In what sense could we be said to be not separate from, for example, galaxies which are yet to be discovered? This would only make sense conceptually if a universal or collective mind were posited in which all the things and events we call the universe are thoughts or imaginings that our own experiences, thoughts and imaginings are "mirroring". In this view the essence of things would be ideal and physicality itself a manifestation of this ideality.

There can be no definitive evidence either way, but the assumption of mind independent energetic structures and processes is arguably the more parsimonious hypothesis, and to me, the more plausible. I acknowledge that in the final analysis plausibility, if not parsimony, is a matter of taste, though.

I suppose you can say that, but we can have certain knowledge of mathematical proofs, and so on. — Wayfarer

Sure, but mathematics is conceptual, so the knowledge there is analytic and does not by itself tell us anything about the world. It seems that the world is mathematical and patterned in structure, though, and even some animals can do rudimentary counting, so it does not seem implausible that it should evolve out of pattern recognition. Animals can also recognize things, obviously; otherwise they would be unable to survive.

Anyway, as I tried to say before, it's Saturday morning here, my other half is annoyed with me playing with my invisible friends, so have to sign out for a while. Bye. — Wayfarer

You should explain to your "other half" that from the fact that she cannot see us it does not follow that we are invisible. :brow:

I think that's a disingenuous claim and all the more so since you know very well that I actually used to agree with you on this, and that I have at least as much reading of Kant as you do, and since you apparently cannot say what it is that I purportedly don't understand. It looks much more like you are employing the disingenuous tactic of claiming that I don't understand because you are unable to address the objection I raised.

I refer you to the answers I've given you many previous times, which you say are a dodge, or are not answering your question, or failing to see the point. I might address it, and others might fail to understand what I've said. There's really nothing further I can do about that, either. — Wayfarer

You claim you have given answers, but I have never seen anything from you that I would count as a satisfactory answer to the question. Now I'm not criticising you for assuming idealism; when it comes to that question we all have to assume something or remain undecided, what I object to is the claim that you have evidence for your assumption.

I object to the same claim in realists for their assumption of realism, although I do believe that some form of realism (taken to mean that the objects and processes we experience are independently existent, even though the ways we experience them is obviously not) is a more parsimonious explanation of how it could be that we all experience the same objects in the same locations.

And you're an idealist of some flavor, right? Well then, how can you use physical sciences and (interpretations of) physical theories to support without self-inconsistency your purportedly non-physicalist (idealist) philosophical positions? — 180 Proof

I just made the same point, and have done in the past, but that is an objection Wayfarer simply refuses to address. I wonder why?

Let me have another go. I've already said, in this thread, that I'm an empical realist. As I understand it, Kant also says that whilst he is a transcendental idealist, he's an empirical realist also. I don't see a conflict. But almost everyone here immediately assumes, well, if you're an idealist, 'you think the world is all in your mind'. People said the same of Kant after the first edition of CPR! That's why in the second edition he included the critique of Berkeley. — Wayfarer

What does it mean to be an empirical realist if not to say that the phenomena we collectively experience are independent of any mind? From my readings of Kant and his expositors I think that is what he thought. The way in which these things appear to us, but not the things themselves, are dependent on the kinds of senses and minds we have, or as I would prefer to put it, the kinds of embodied beings we are.

As to his transcendental idealism, I take that to mean that we can only speculate what things are "in themselves", or what anything even the mind itself is "in itself" via ideas, and that those ideas can never constitute knowledge. That is why Kant is understood to have undermined traditional metaphysics which had always been based on the idea that we have a faculty of intellectual intuition which was taken to yield knowledge of the real.

In that case, you misunderstand my position, as often, but with the amount of incoming flak, I can't really deal with it right now. — Wayfarer

There's always an excuse for your inability to deal with objections that threaten your beliefs. You always claim I misunderstand your position and yet always fail to explain how I am misunderstanding it.

It's an a priori argument, based on the observation that there's no light inside the skull. — Wayfarer

But that observation, according to your own argument, is derived from what is empirically given and hence must be (according to you) unreliable as a guide to what is real, and also the argument, being based as it is on an empirically given observation does not, according to the standard definition, qualify as an a priori argument.

Read my response to Christoffer.The WHO present no information for the types of useful comparisons I am seeking. If you think they do then send me a link to the precise thing I am asking for.

In short - the world is not simply given. It is in some fundamental sense projected by the observing mind. The sense in which it exists outside of or apart from that mind is an empty question, because nothing we can know is ever outside of or apart from the act of knowing by which we are concious of the existence of the world in the first place. This doesn't mean the world is all in my mind, but that the mind - yours, mine, the species and cultural mind of h. sapiens - is an inextricable foundation of the world we know, but we can't see it, because it is what we're looking through, and with. — Wayfarer

What evidence could you possibly have that the world is "in some fundamental sense projected by the observing mind." if the fundamental nature of the world is, by your own argument, ineluctably hidden from us? How would you explain the easily testable fact that we all project the same objects in the same locations except by appealing to a collective mind? Is there any evidence of a collective mind? If not, would not the most parsimonious explanation be that we divide the world up conceptually in ways which reflect the actual structures which appear to us as objects and events, as well as the actual hidden structures of our own constitutions?

I wasn't able to access that without registering. Do have any open source information or data?

Try searching on the WHO site for statistics comparing the drop in the number of cases Covid in countries mapped against the percentage of the populations vaccinated. That might give a more accurate picture if it was available. I wasn't able to find that kind of useful information.

Try searching on the WHO site for statistics showing the numbers of adverse reactions to the vaccines. Good luck with that!

Try searching on the WHO site for statistics showing the decline in cases of Covid where Ivermectin has been administered compared to neighbouring regions where it has not. I couldn't find any such.

So, what reason do I have for believing that the WHO is not a propaganda machine?

On the contrary. In places where vaccination numbers are high new cases, hospitalization, and death has dropped dramatically. — Fooloso4

Please present comparative statistics.

Are you gonna break the restrictions? Are you gonna go out in public? Socialize with people who are unknowing about your refusal? — Christoffer

Those who are vaccinated will, according to your argument, be safe. The only people at risk will be others who have chosen not to have the vaccine. Of course if the vaccines are not effective then those vaccinated will also be at risk, but then...

Firstly, Ivermectin is not a new medicine; according to the information I have it has been around for forty years, and is considered one of the safest medications. Secondly as far as I am aware The American Journal of Therapeutics is a peer-reviewed journal. not a "middling journal" as you assert.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Journal_of_Therapeutics

And it's too early to tell how effective the vaccines are at this stage. Cases are on the rise again in the UK despite more than 70% of the population having had the first shot of vaccine..