'post-modernity' is a descriptive label for a period or development in history, which is (obviously) subsequent to 'modernism' (which I categorise as the period between, or book-ended by, the publication of Newton's Principia and Einstein's General Theory of Relativity). — Wayfarer

I think most people would put the beginnings of postmodernism as later than that date of 1915, which is when Einsteins General Theory was published.

Accounts I've read put it mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, with perhaps just a few forerunners in the forties.

I think of it as in a way a reaction against the horrors of the second war, which was seen by some as the culmination of modernism.

This is non-scientific anecdotal opining. — Hanover

What a telling, pithy phrase! I will definitely use that, next time I get an opportunity.

The opposite perspective (which I believe is more realistic), is that the temporal continuity of existence requires an acting force (traditionally that would be God). — Metaphysician Undercover

That is a metaphysical perspective, not a physical one, and what you refer to as a force there is completely different from what a force means in physics.

What you describe is Aquinas' belief that objects require a constant act of will to sustain their existence. I have no objection to that belief, but it is a belief that some hold and some do not, and that cannot be proved or disproved. Further, the act of will to which it refers is nothing like what Newton means by a force.

Are you sure that shouldn't be Merkwürdigliebe? I am a novice at German but I am pretty sure there is no word "Merkwurdich".

I also wonder whether "seltsam" is a more appropriate translation of "strange" for Sellers' character, as it carries a connotation of "weird", whereas - so I understand - merkwürdig just means unusual, or at most "odd".

I'd be delighted to be corrected by any native German speakers.

Quotas at the top don't account for or solve imbalances that are stratified throughout a hierarchy. — VagabondSpectre

In white collar professions that tends not to be the case. In medicine and law more graduate entrants are female than male, yet most of the people in senior positions are male. My observation is that in business generally, men only slightly outnumber women at the graduate entry level, but the upper echelons are dominated by men. SO in those professions at least, attention is needed at the medium to higher levels of the hierarchy.

Of course there are plenty of other problems that go across levels, such as the domination of women in poorly-paid 'caring' professions, and the lower participation of girls in STEM training. The arguments for and against quotas are different therefrom the ones that apply in parliaments and boardrooms. It is possible to be convinced that quotas won't work in increasing female STEM participation at the same time as favouring their introduction in boardrooms and political parties.

Personally, I think that carefully-designed quotas might be able to help in the STEM area as well, for class imbalance as well as sex imbalance. But that's a different discussion and the pros and cons are different.

apart from the Muslim Brotherhood I assume few political parties are entrenched with misogynists. — ssu

This highlights the dangers of people using 'misogyny' as a synonym for 'sexism'. The two are very different, with only a small area of overlap. Far too often people use the word 'misogyny' when they mean 'sexism'.

You are right. Very few men actually hate women. But many men either think they are superior to women in the features that matter (such as intellect), or that women's roles should be constrained to the traditional ones of home-making and caring.

The toxic masculine culture that persists in many male-dominated parliaments, party rooms, board rooms, men's clubs and sport clubs incorporates those features of perceived superiority, desire for women to keep to their place, and very often the treating of women generally as sex objects rather than as humans. The latter manifests through telling jokes that portray women as sex objects, plus language, songs and chants that do the same. None of this qualifies as misogyny, but it is enough to make the vast majority of women to want to go nowhere such a bunch of people.

Personally I would like to see people stop saying things are misogynist when what they really mean is sexist, demeaning, or even rape-culturish.

Assange is a political prisoner. — fishfry

I don't think we can say that at this stage. At present he is held on charges of skipping bail for charges of sexual assault in Sweden, which is fair enough. If Sweden were to reactivate its charges and Assange were to be extradited to there solely to be tried on those charges, that would be fair enough. Or the UK could just jail him for a year if he is convicted of the charge of skipping bail, and then let him go free. That too would be fair enough.

But if the UK government were to extradite him to the US, or even to detain him solely for the purpose of considering such an extradition, he would absolutely be a political prisoner.

If more women aren't making it to office because of a myriad of social obstacles placed before them, foisting a few more individual women into parliament solves nothing. — VagabondSpectre

What if one of the main obstacles is a toxic masculine culture in parliaments and party rooms that discourages them from getting involved? Experience shows that a pretty reliable way to dissolve toxicly masculine cultures is to require them to have a significant proportion of women in their midst. That can be achieved by quotas. Once the quotas have done their job, the obstacle will be gone and the quotas will no longer be necessary.

In 1994 the Australian Labor Party introduced quotas for the proportion of women in winnable seats. It was met with strong internal resistance at the time, but some brave souls pushed it through. The result is that the party's culture has changed enormously, it has very strong female representation in parliament, most of its its most potent political operators are women, and its opponent - the strangely-named Liberal party - is now broadly perceived as being anti-women, which is an enormous electoral liability for them.

I didn't say it was a scientific principle. I said it was a scientific concept. Rest is a definition. We say an object is at rest relative to another if the displacement vector from the first to the second is constant over time.

Perhaps what you are challenging is whether it is ever possible for two objects to be perfectly at rest relative to one another. If so, fair enough. There will always e some tiny degree of relative movement, albeit imperceptible. All that matters in physics is whether such imperceptible movement can affect the predictions made by calculations based on an assumption that the object is at rest. In almost all cases, it doesn't.

The point though, is that "rest" is an ontological principle. Therefore the reason why one rest frame is preferred over another ought to be ontological rather than pragmatic. — Metaphysician Undercover

Your claim that it is an ontological principle is what creates your problem. That's why it is unhelpful to adopt an ontology that includes such a principle, and unhelpful to regard 'rest' as an ontological concept instead of a scientific one that is used for calculations and predictions.

If the preferred rest frame makes sense to you, then why not allow that there is an ideal, or best rest frame (absolute rest)? — Metaphysician Undercover

'Preferred' is a function of someone's mind - the person that prefers it. It is not ontological. For a given calculation there will often be a frame that makes the calculation simplest. Indeed, in GR, the biggest challenge is often in finding a frame that makes the calculations manageable. Again, that is a pragmatic, rather than an ontological consideration. There will be no universally preferred frame because a frame that is best for one purpose may be terrible for another. A laboratory-based frame is best for lab-based experiments. An Earth-centred frame is best for satellite management. A sun-centred frame is best for long-range space missions and predicting movements of solar system bodies other than the moon.

For a cabin attendant serving meals in a commercial jet, the preferred frame is that of the jet, but for an air traffic controller directing the flight paths for the jet and other planes, the preferred frame is that of the control tower. Neither would want to use the frame of the other.

Sure, if one adopts an ontological perspective that says there is such a thing as absolute motion, rather than just relative motion, then one will have a problem. That seems a good reason not to adopt such a perspective.

As I said, it's a problem with relativity theory, and that's because it robs us the capacity to determine real motions. — Metaphysician Undercover

If you believe in real motions then you will have a problem with relativity theory. It is your problem, not the theory's problem.

It doesn't feel like a partition to me. That may be because in most instances it will be a rhetorical question. It's just a different way to say 'Please get me a glass of water', to which the response is an action of the hands, not the mouth - handing the glass of water to the speaker.

I find these types of speech acts easier to analyse under Wittgenstein's approach which essentially asks what the purpose of the speech act is, rather than what its meaning is. In this case the purpose is to obtain a glass of water.

To me, 'purpose' is a more robust and universal concept than 'meaning'.

Is this essentialism? Cavell's thesis seems to be that if our kind of houses do not turn into our kind of flowers, they must have an essential property, rather than an accidental property, that they turn into heaps of rubble when their existence as a house ends, rather than into a flower.

I see no reason why the turning into rubble could not be seen as an accidental property of houses. It would change very little in the way we interact with and talk about houses. I can easily imagine a world in which Professor McGonagall could utter the incantation fleurismus! and wave her wand in just the right way to transfigure a bungalow into a peony. I could imagine a somewhat less magical world in which some sort of emotional or spiritual force field made a house spontaneously collapse in a cloud of dust when the last person that had lived in it died, and when the dust cleared, there was a bed of blooming roses.

It seems to me that the statement 'houses don't turn into flowers' is a simple observation of an accidental property of objects in the particular world we inhabit.

Caveat: My worldview is very non-essentialist, so I am not intimately familiar with the rules and conventions of essentialism. Perhaps a signed-up Aristotelean would object to the way I am using terms such as 'accidental property'.

I had never heard of Tammy Duckworth, but I looked her up on wiki and she sounds tremendously impressive. Quite an inspiration!

If not a men's "rights' movement, a lot of men would, I think, benefit from a men's movement directed toward sex-role excellence--that is, finding better models among men to emulate. — Bitter Crank

I have recently come across a few sites that seem, at least on the surface, to celebrate masculinity in a positive way, rather than whinging about women or promoting violence. This arose when I was looking for information about getting a push reel mower (being a fanatical greenie) and the best source of info about it was on such a site. Then I turned to the ecology of shaving, wanting to dump disposable razors and use razor blades, and the same site had good info on that. When I searched further, some of the good info about shaving options was on other such "men's" sites.

Curious, I browsed one or two of the sites further to see if there was hidden patriarchalism, misogyny, violence or incel-ism. I couldn't find any, or any demanding of 'male rights', but I might just not be very thorough.

Here is the site where I got good info on push mowers and razors. I'd be interested in the opinions of others:
https://www.artofmanliness.com/

your argument why Scruton is islamophobic is the wording "huge tribes" basically. — ssu

I think it is more the word 'invasion'. To describe a stream of desperate, terrified, hungry refugees as an invasion strikes me as heartless at best and quite possibly dog-whistling. The current government in Australia has form in using that word to try to garner the racist vote. Then when challenged they claim that their harsh border control measures are only for the benefit of the refugees - 'to save them from drowning at sea'.

I am not persuaded that there was any anti-Semitism in what Scruton wrote, but I find that 'invasion' sentence deplorable. The 'huge tribes' bit is secondary, but makes it worse. He could have said 'sudden flood of desperate Syrian refugees' and still conveyed the stress the Hungarians felt, without the associated dog-whistling.

you get a whole lot of people who are "spiritual but not religious" cause they want all the coziness of a creator without the hassle of being told what to do or what is right and wrong. — NKBJ

That is a cynical view of what SBNR means, and I would say that in the majority of cases it is wrong.

One could just as well argue that allowing oneself to be told what to do is the cowardly option, because it avoids having to take moral responsibility for one's own decisions. On that analysis, the SBNRs are the courageous ones, taking the hard road.

I don't think either extreme is correct.

I cited Leo's mention of Nazism — boethius

Are you sure that was your first reference to it? According to the site's search function you were the first user. It's possible that it's malfunctioning or I am using it wrong.

No one here is calling anyone else a Nazi, so you're not even using Godwin's law correctly to begin with. — boethius

Godwin's law is about the probability of a comparison to the Nazis. That is what you did above when you said there were parallels.

The point is that if you had a rational argument you wouldn't need to play the Nazi card, which is always rhetorical. If something is wrong, it can be argued to be wrong on its merits. The rational basis for the argument is in no way helped by saying that the Nazis did it - like listening to Wagner, dressing up and in some cases, being vegetarian. :scream:

Boethius gets the Godwin Prize for being the first in the discussion to play the Nazi card. Yet another confirmation of Godwin's Law.

Perhaps it should be a rule that any thread gets automatically closed after one hundred posts, to head off the inevitable Nazi comparisons.

An example of knowing but not knowing that you know might be blind sight. As described, it appears that someone with blind sight could know that they are facing a red swatch of material, but not know that they know that.

Very odd!

That's an interesting solution, but I'm not sure that "I believe that" really is an idempotent operator here. Saying that I believe that P does not mean the same thing as saying I believe that I believe that P. The former asserts that I think that the world is a certain way. The latter states that I think that I possess a certain mental state; that of thinking the world is a certain way. And of course, the more "I believe that"'s we add, the more the meaning will diverge from the original "I believe that P", until it gets so complicated that I can't understand it. — PossibleAaran

It depends on what one means by 'I believe that P'.

In philosophy that sort of statement is a cliche and usually leads to boredom, but perhaps one can make something slightly non-boring from it here. We could investigate it a little by asking whether in order for 'I believe that P' to be true one must have held the proposition P in one's mind at one stage. If one says Yes to that then it could certainly be the case that one believes P but doesn't believe that they believe P because they have never held the thought 'I believe that I believe that P' in their mind.

I am inclined to the opposite interpretation, that holding the thought in one's mind at some time is not necessary for belief. I think belief can be non-verbal. Dogs and toddlers in happy homes believe that their humans love them, but are unable to articulate that thought internally. Perhaps even a person that has language may believe something without articulating it in their mind. We may feel that a person we have met is kind or hostile and hence implicitly believe that about them without having explicitly thought it.

Interestingly, this perspective seems to count against 'I believe that...' being idempotent. Somebody that is very arrogant believes that they are better than most people but would quite likely sincerely deny that they believe that. They believe they are better than others, but don't believe that they believe that.

I wonder then if it might be the case that the operator 'I believe that...' is one such that applying it twice can be different from applying it once, but applying it more than two times is the same as applying it twice. I imagine there are such operators but I need to ride to work now so I will leave it to other mathematically-inclined posters to find an example of such an operator.

I have forgotten how this relates to the thread but nevertheless I find it interesting. I apologise if my digression irritates.

If psychiatry is a science which t accepts that individuals are not self-causing agents, then I cannot see how psychiatric evaluation as currently practiced is particularly relevant to establishing guilt. — sime

I don't know a great deal about how it is used in the criminal justice system, but my impression is that the involvement of psychiatry is mostly related to determining the best method of dealing with the situation, rather than the assignment of guilt which is, in my opinion, purely a matter of opinion.

I imagine that, if a claim is made that the accused was suffering mental disturbance at the time of the alleged crime, the value of psychiatry would be in assessing whether the frame of mind the person had at the time was likely to recur. If it was, and the crime was very grave, it may be necessary to restrain the person for longer than the range of criminal sentences allows. On the other hand, if it was a psychiatric event that was unlikely to recur, it may be considered appropriate to have a shorter period of incarceration, or none. These considerations could be made based on the principles of public protection and deterrence, rather than retribution, which is all that the notion of 'guilt' relates to.

I also imagine this varies between cultures. In the US, which seems to have a retributive focus, 'guilt' may be seen as important. I don't think retribution plays much of a role in Scandinavian countries.

OK. But it appears the OP's first language is Russian, so maybe it was a translation problem. — frank

I see that as taking the principle of charity too far. I am all for making allowances for language difficulties in civilised discussion, or even for different intentions of meaning from someone whose first language is the same as mine. But extending it to someone handing out condemnations is twisting the principle beyond any recognition of what it is about. Somebody handing out condemnations need not expect charity from any quarter. I certainly would steer very clear of making condemnations in any language in which I was conversant but not expert. In fact, I am expert in English, and I try to avoid making condemnations in that language too.

A philosophy forum should be all-inclusive to achieve maximal diversity of input. — whollyrolling

The trouble with philosophy forums is that as soon as someone says 'should', others will descend upon them asking 'whence comes this should....', misquoting Hume saying 'ye cannut git an awt from an uz' and demanding a synchronisation of meta-ethical stances before we can address the content of the 'should'.

His exact quote was, "many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire," and which is a hairsplitting distinction from outright saying, "Jewish intelligentsia networks", and committed or even casual antisemites wouldn't see any significant difference. — Maw

I disagree. To me the gulf between the two is unfathomably large.

That seems fair enough. I would add that the infinite series of "I believe that..." collapses to a single one because it is what mathematicians call an 'idempotent operator'. That means that applying it any number of times in succession has the identical effect to applying it once.

The link gives an example of a physical idempotent operator: an On button on an electric device. This contrasts with an On/Off toggle, whose effect depends on the initial state and on whether the number of times it is pressed is odd or even.

A mathematical example would be the operation of rounding to the nearest integer. Doing it once has the same result as doing it a million or infinitely many times.

even if the Relativist can appeal to the ordinary notion of truth, it doesn't change the fact that his position generates an infinite regress when you try to understand it. — PossibleAaran

How do you make that out? How does one get a regress out of a person saying "I don't believe in objective truth". In what's above, the regress relied on the statement being the very different "I don't believe in truth".

Mum sensibly punishes Jemimah for skipping school, not for having a belief about it.

Does that not show that "truth" in ordinary English invovles something the Relativist cannot accept? — PossibleAaran

I think she punishes Jemimah for lying, and lying is deliberately saying something you don't believe.

In everyday language, someone is telling the truth if they are saying what they believe. When talking about the truth in general, the idea seems to be that the truth is what most people would believe if they had witnessed whatever it was,

None of this has any bearing on 'absolute truth' or 'objective truth', which could be absolutely anything in the presence of Last Thursdayism or Descartes' demon.

How does the second half of the full quotation justify the first half regarding a "Soros Empire", and "Jewish intelligentsia networks", which are in and of themselves, antiSemitic remarks? — Maw

According to the original quote, and even according to Eaton's article, Scruton never said 'Jewish intelligentsia networks', which would have nasty connotations, implying the age-old belief in a Jewish conspiracy. He spoke of 'Budapest intelligentsia' and 'networks around the Soros empire'. To me at least, that has very different connotations. Further, the overall tone of that paragraph is one of empathising with the Budapest intelligentsia.

Accuracy in reporting is crucial, and misreporting what Scruton said as a hot-button phrase like 'Jewish intelligentsia networks' is inflammatory.

I disagree with Roger Scruton on most things, and I don't agree with him about 'Islamophobia' but, reading most of what he said, I can't see any grounds for the accusations made against him. With one possible exception - see below - it does sound like an ill-considered knee-jerk reaction by a government that is jumping at shadows because of the mess it's got itself into over Brexit.

The exception is the following quote, reported in Eaton's article:

"The Hungarians were extremely alarmed by the sudden invasion of huge tribes of Muslims from the Middle East.”

I would need to see the context to fully understand it but on the face of it, the use of the word 'invasion' to describe desperate refugees fleeing a horrific war sounds heartless at best and bigoted at worst.

Given Eaton appears an unreliable and tendentious source, I would want to see corroboration about what Scruton actually said in that regard.

Before many-worlds, reality had always been viewed as a single unfolding history. Many-worlds, however, views historical reality as a many-branched tree — Wayfarer

It is usually thought of like that, but it doesn't have to be. Another version is that there is no splitting, but just an infinite number of parallel worlds and for each world W and time t there are infinitely many that are identical to W up to time t, but that differ in some respect after t, which could be because of an observation at that time having a different outcome.

Under that perspective, the 'splitting' is epistemic rather than ontological. We were always in the world in which the measured spin on a particle at midday on 20/4/19 was going to be Up and not the one in which it would be Down, but we didn't know which one we were in until 20/4/19.

Since the differences between this setup and the branching one are by definition unobservable, it is moot which one we believe (if we believe either - I don't agree with the suggestion somewhere above that one has to believe some form of many-worlds).

The Relativist would immediately run into the objection that when he says "I don't believe in truth", he means to state something which is true — PossibleAaran

The statement is not 'I don't believe in truth' but 'I don't believe in objective truth'. The qualifier is critical and removes any self-referential or regression problem.

The speaker is not believing what she says to be 'objectively true'. Truth has a perfectly functional meaning in ordinary speech, which is something like what one believes*, and that is all that the person means when they make their statement.

*Consider the following conversation:

Mum: 'I heard you skipped school today.'
Jemimah: 'No I didn't.'
Mum: 'Is that true?'
Jemimah: 'Yes'

Mum is asking Jemimah about whether what she says is consistent with her state of knowledge. 'Objective truth', whatever that is, doesn't come into it.

So it's an objective fact that everything possible is actually happening, at every moment of time, in the many-worlds hypothesis? — Metaphysician Undercover

Personally, I wouldn't say that, because I think the useful everyday word 'objective' loses its meaning when it is deployed in a philosophical context. But it seems to me that the statement is at least as reasonable as most other statements in which I can recall people using 'objective' in a philosophical context.

in no way does it resolve the basic issue of ultimate objectivity. — Wayfarer

I suppose that depends on what one believes that issue to be. It's not an issue I am familiar with - at least not by that name.

Are you happy to know you will die? — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Yes.

Life is long and one will tire of it after a while.
I am happy to know that somebody else will get a chance to live, that my departure will have made some space for them to live in.

Sometimes that seems like I believe in reincarnation and sometimes it doesn't.

How does a 'many worlds interpretation' posit a 'single objective reality'? Because if there are indeed infinite numbers of 'other worlds' or parallel dimensions, or if the universe 'splits' into different universes as is implicit in this 'meta-theory', then each of these universes are inaccessible from any other one. So how could they be considered ‘objective' when they can't even be known? — Wayfarer

Each is known by the observers in that world, and not by the observers in any other world.

In a sense, the many-worlds hypothesis is a reductio ad absurdum of the notion of objective reality, because everything possible happens in at least one world, so there is no objective fact of the matter about whether any given event happens. What is objective is the god's eye view of all the worlds. But only gods can have that view.

if SOME Muslims had their way, then everyone would be practicing Islam — Ilya B Shambat

Fixed it for you.

This sort of error of omission cannot be lightly excused, because the omission renders the statement both false and vicious.

Thanks for linking that. The comments from Demystifier and other members whose opinion I respect, align with my impression that this paper doesn't reveal anything new of significance. It effectively just affirms that if you insist on locality then you have to give up on CFD, which is in many ways the same thing as 'objective reality'. Bell told us that in the early sixties.