Call X a "witch hunt". Build the common false belief that the hunt is looking for "collusion". Perpetuate that belief by continually speaking about it in those terms. Relish in the purported 'charges'. Build their characterization in the public eye. Refuse to talk about it in other terms.

If enough people think in your terms, when no collusion is found by the witch hunt, they will be much easier to convince of your innocence, despite the fact that X never looked for collusion to begin with.

The question then arises, how is it possible to distinguish whether concepts arise from different mechanisms, or concepts arise by degree from a simpliciter, or, divide into simpliciters from a whole, from one mechanism? — Mww

By comparison.

I would echo this sentiment regarding the thread itself...

So do properties, for you, exist prior to our naming them? I think it is reasonable to say that they do, but they are not in any way separate from, or "had by" or "attached to" things, as naming can make them seem to be. — Janus

So, if I read you correctly, you're claiming that properties are not in any way separate from things.

I'm inclined to agree with that. Different, but not separate.

Some things exist in their entirety prior to our naming them. The properties of such things must also exist prior to our naming them if such things consist, in part at least, of those properties.

The same thing as always...

Are we naming something that exists in it's entirety prior to our name? If so, what supportive argument are we using to say that? If it's simply because we say so - by definitional fiat - then that's inadequate here. The saying so requires some knowledge of what the thing being named consists of.

As it pertains to the thread, and the notion of properties and their part in our experience, well it gets interesting when the person using the notion explains how properties play a role in experience.

It's not one church. — Banno

Right.

And that matters here because?

Relationships with others amounts to much more than to whom one makes charitable donations.

The church claims to help those in need. Actually, the church does help far more in need than most(anti-church enthusiasts) care to admit. So, in that sense, giving to the church is giving to the homeless.

It's a bit misleading to say that it does not focus upon relationships with others...

Joel Osteen focuses upon that all the time.

It lends itself well to televangelism...

It promises hope to those without. More and more are without hope but with television.

Those two things could be how/why it's growing.

It's not clear to me what roles mood and the emotional life, or indeed physical appetites, have in your formulation. Language-less infants have already learnt 'how to behave in certain situations' and may well have laid the foundations for all sorts of other aspects of how they'll be, haven't they? Emotions, educated by life and reason and other emotions,, still guide me in much of what I do or don't do. — mcdoodle

A quick perusal through an earlier thread of mine found the above. I want to offer a current reply.

Emotions are correlational content. The OP mentions 'states of mind'. With a rudimentary level thinking and believing creature, we're talking about the creature's emotions and instinctual drives. Fear. Hunger. Discontent. Relaxed. Content. Fearless.

Repetitive correlations develop into a sense of familiarity, given enough time. Creatures without complex written language tend to pay no heed to that which is part of the everyday order of events much less-so than those like us, who have invented so many different ways to talk about the world and/or ourselves. However, we too find ourselves on autopliot... especially on long drives with much to think about. We often arrive to a particular destination in what seems like very little time at all, when quite some time had actually passed,

I'm going to look a bit closer at your site... the belief icon in particular...

Cheers!

Let me see if I can clarify... Your answer was fine.

Getting thought and belief right, is not equivalent to having true thought and belief, except if and when we're talking about having true thought and belief about our own thought and belief. I'm particularly interested in what all thought and belief consists of.

You draw a distinction between intentions and belief. I would concur. However, while intentions consist of more than just belief, they are existentially dependent upon belief, but not the other way around. Intentions are plans... forethought to do something in particular. Whereas belief can be as simple as attributing causality or perhaps having/holding/forming expectation.

Well put. Thomas Paine. One of my all time favorites when it somes to consifering when to decide that the government has made life worse than it would be without it.

:smile:

I sometimes get the feeling that you're a sheep in wolf's clothing.

Confusing imagination with reality.

Get a room.

Yeah. I know.

Many philosophers posit impossible scenarios. Brains in vats are dead. There is never going to be a time where I sit and count people as a means to determine which ones I should push into the oncoming trolley, simply because some 'philosopher' type says I have to do it...

Whatever...

Powerful first impression(linking your site).

I wonder, since it is evident that you take all this quite seriously...

How important is it, by your lights, for us to get thought and belief right?

I reject Hume and Kant on different grounds than you've mentioned here. But... the difference is one of degree, it seems and not kind so much. I mean I agree with what you just pointed out about Hume's and Kant's frameworks.

Has anyone had that Nietzschean moment where you come down from the mountain, so to speak, and applied your philosophy to living... — NOS4A2

I would not know what philosophy would even look like if it wasn't continually being applied to everyday real life events.

What else could test it?

Read Benkei's last post.

Mueller did not exonerate Trump of anything. The Mueller report did not either! Mueller was not looking for evidence of collusion.

Here in the United States prosecutors are supposed to prove guilt, not innocence. — NOS4A2

So what? Irrelevant. Trump's AG(or was it the FBI director?) claimed that the Mueller report exonerated Trump of collusion. Those claims were made well in advance of anyone else looking at the reports for themselves.

Poisoning the well does not even begin to describe that kind of fraudulent behaviour.

Here's a thought....

It is an actual real life issue, and a very contentious one at that, regarding whether or not a sitting president can be indicted.

There are no statutes of limitation here to be worried about. The timeframe would allow for all the haggling to continue. Trump loses the election.

Then. Indicted.

Gibberish.

The only people I see still using the term are those who keep on saying that Trump is not guilty of it. That term is one of endearment for many who watch Fox and listen intently to the president, and trust that what he says is true. Trump loves using the term, because he can help perpetuate the fucking fraud against The United States of America that his own AG began...

Mueller did not exonerate Trump of anything. The Mueller report did not either! Mueller was not looking for evidence of collusion.

Jesus fucking christ...

Sorry Mom. Sorry Grandma.

You say it that way.

What if I said: Things appear (where 'thing' is taken in the broadest sense as objects, processes, colours, basically anything you can think of). What is it then that "has" properties? Are not properties just among the "things" that appear (if we allow that shapes, colours, textures and so on are even separable from shaped, coloured and textured objects)? — Janus

"Property" is just a name.

It seems to me that that 'chopping up' of experience that we do prior to applying the label "quale" to it isn't particularly reflective of what it's like at all. What it's like to be in any experiential state is a colossal feedback and intermingling of my senses and thoughts. — fdrake

...what in this experience furnishes the distinction between the shape and the colour of the table? — fdrake

Very well put fdrake.

Taking account of having the experience is itself it's own experience. Thinking intently about all the different aspects of one's experience is much the same experience aside from it need not be spoken, but could be, if need be. It's precisely what it's like to think about our own thought and belief.

Language used as a tool to slice up(think about) our experience... that's what furnishes the distinction between the shape and colour of the table.

Any way you could restate that without making unverifiable charges? I'd be very surprised if Schiff used the term "collusion".

Austin's How To Do Things With Words maybe?

I have a copy...

I've never thought about an utterance of ought in terms of direction of fit. Promises... that's another matter altogether... Very interesting when talking in terms of what counts as a moral claim, moral facts, and what it takes for one(the claim that is) to be true(matching the moral fact(s) where "facts" are what has happened and/or is happening. That's my current working framework.

On your account are promises moral claims?

The truth is Trump was innocent despite all claims and worries to the contrary. There was no Russian collusion, no conspiracy to defraud the US, no obstruction. — NOS4A2

There was Russian interference. Trump's close relatives worked with some of those agents. Trump hired a known Ukrainian agent(Manafort). The Mueller report cited enough evidence of obstruction to warrant passing the baton. Mueller did not openly say either way... that, in and of itself, is beyond his purview. He determined there was enough evidence to go to the next phase... He passed the baton...

The next runner dropped it...

For fuck's sake... Trump has a current cabinet member who used to work in Cyprus laundering Russian money...

Creativesoul just helped me illustrate this case. — god must be atheist

You've misunderstood. Different folk have different ideas of what's good. So what?

Mahalo.

Is that Austin or Searle, or someone else? It's from the Speech Act Theorists, isn't it?

"Collusion" is a red herring. Very well used. Self-perpetuated nonetheless. There is no such crime. He knew - they knew - there would never be any such charge of collusion. So, no matter what come of the investigation... it could not ever be a case of being guilty of collusion.

Read the Mueller report. Watch the testimony.

Exactly right. The media and DNC inundation of Trump/Russian collusion was based on that falsity from the get go. We don’t need the Mueller report or his testimony to realize that, but we no less heard it for nearly three years. — NOS4A2

It is indeed exactly right! Someone cannot be convicted of a crime that does not exist. Collusion - in this case - is every bit as inapplicable as jaywalking.

That said... there are all sorts of other things being looked at. That's what a deposition is all about. It's the first step in the process. Given the high national security concerns, and the fact that it is not at all uncommon to hold private depositions - ALL of them are, anyone unauthorized to be there that walks in and is also a player in the later proceedings should the deposition warrant, ought be fucking charged with obstruction.

Did you believe Trump colluded with Russia to help him win the election? — NOS4A2

"Collusion" is a red herring. Very well used. Self-perpetuated nonetheless. There is no such crime. He knew - they knew - there would never be any such charge of collusion. So, no matter what come of the investigation... it could not ever be a case of being guilty of collusion.

Read the Mueller report. Watch the testimony.

More or less. There is not a clear distinction on my account of prescriptive claims that are moral versus ones that are not moral, but sometimes in writing about it I get the feeling that using the word "moral" in place of just "prescriptive" might confuse some part of the audience, so I'm not certain that for all speakers they are synonymous.

The sense I get from those who might make such a distinction is between other-directed action and self-directed action, though on my account there is no need to make that distinction for the claims to be broadly speaking "moral": I'd say one ought not, for example, literally beat oneself up (like punch oneself in the face) over one's failures, and that "ought" is prescriptive, and therefore on my account the same kind of claim as a claim that one ought not beat up overs over their failures, but I get the sense that others would say that only the latter claim about interpersonal action is "moral" and the first is... something else, I guess? I would make a distinction between self-directed and other-directed action when it comes to procedural justice, saying that someone has the right to beat themselves up but not the right to beat someone else up, but that's only a subset of moral concerns, and in the broader sense I'd say that the first is moral too. — Pfhorrest

How does the direction of fit play a part(apply) in "One ought not literally beat oneself up over their failures"?

What makes a claim moral in kind? — creativesoul

Its prescriptivity, which can be elaborated upon in terms of direction of fit. A descriptive claim is like a detective's list of the things a man he's investigating bought at the grocery store; a prescriptive claim is like the shopping list the man's wife gave him. The lists might be exactly the same, but they are for different purposes: if the things the man bought disagree with the detective's list, the detective's list is wrong, but if the things the man bought disagree with his wife's list, the things the man bought are wrong instead. — Pfhorrest

Are all prescriptive claims moral in kind?

Moral claims are not descriptive, they're prescriptive... — Pfhorrest

What makes a claim moral in kind?

Reason is better than logic for explanation. Neither is capable of explaining the unknown aside from being unknown - by definition. It's commonly thought of as an empty concept. However, it's not at all empty. To quite the contrary, it includes everything unknown.

To believe that it is possible to explain everything, one already presupposes that it's possible to know everything.

See the problem here?

Do you wanna keep on being Putin's pawn
Tell you what he's gonna do-ooo-oo
Do you wanna keep on being Putin's pawn
Cause there's so much more that he wants from you

it's Putin, not Trump, who has made progress. — Echarmion

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding...

We have a winner!

Philosophy has also given me pause at times. It can be quite disillusioning to realize that some things are not the way you thought they were. It can be quite disheartening to realize that what needs fixed cannot be fixed because the current circumstances quite simply aren't amenable to the sorts of change that needs to happen in order to fix things.

This seems an appropriate segue to revert back to being a bit more directly connected with the OP.

Philosophy helped me tremendously in that I've developed a much more reliable criterion for critically examining all the different narratives. In addition, it's also helped me to better navigate my own personal relationships, you know, the daily interactions we all have(I presume).

An earlier poster remarked about the lack of popular appeal. I would agree. That's a large part of why I'm very fond of putting things as simply and concisely as possible, whenever possible, assuming we're talking about an adequate explanation. "God did it" does not work for me(for example).

A few simple, common sense, defensible, and easily teachable ones...


What would happen if everyone acted like that?

Be helpful.

Do what's good for goodness sake.