quote:Originally posted by Mike: I'm ok with saying that moral statements have no truth value. Unless you're saying something like, "I think killing babies is wrong", or "In this culture killing babies is wrong" — those are true. Does that make me a metaethical moral relativist? I've never been a big fan of labels.
Um, both of your examples are moral statements. So if you think they have truth value, then you're at the very least a moral-cognitivist. It sounds to me like you subscribe to moral relativism (if you believe statements like "in this culture blah is good" have truth value).
Very well, I'll amend that to "I'm ok with saying that absolute moral statements of the form 'killing babies is wrong' have no truth value, unless the answer to the question 'wrong according to whom?' is evident."
quote:Labels are extremely useful in philosophy, as long as everyone understands what they mean, since it allows others to get a quick grasp of where you stand on an issue.
I understand that labels can be useful, but they are often confusing and obfuscatory. Sometimes they have multiple subtly different meanings and typically any given person's position doesn't exactly match one of the accepted meanings of the label. Also, labels decrease accessibility to the layman, which is of course unavoidable some of the time (and not always bad, if the advantages are big enough). Finally, labels that are fuzzily defined can lead to faulty reasoning. There are pros and cons, to be sure; not being a pro myself, I tend to lean away from using them.
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Mike, see, this is where understanding terminology comes in handy. If you believe that the statement "it's wrong for you to do X" is ever true or false - relative to a culture or not - then it has truth-value.
Philosophy has built up a very specific vocabulary, similar to most sciences, so that discussing these concepts is easy to do, rather than "confusing and obfuscatory". They're rather important.
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Jhai, How about this. Why don't you tell me how you define objectivity and subjectivity? I don't want a link to an article. Please just tell me in your own words how you define these terms. This isn't me being snarky, I promise. But you are undeniably more familiar with the terminology, so I expect you will be able to explain how you define these terms more readily than I could. Hopefully then we can move on to understanding exactly what we disagree on.
Fyi, I would like to respond to your last reply more thoroughly when I get the chance, but that may be as late as this weekend.
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quote: Philosophy has built up a very specific vocabulary, similar to most sciences, so that discussing these concepts is easy to do, rather than "confusing and obfuscatory".
I question this, given the number of philo papers I've read where a large portion of the content is spent defining terms and all the past major works that often require rather in-depth interpretation in order to fully understand. It seems to me that defining key terms has always been and will continue to be a major issue with philosophical discussion. But that aside, if the people you're having the discussion with do not understand the terminology in the same way you do, then telling them how easy it is to understand isn't exactly helpful.
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To address the point on objectivism vs. subjectivism: the most classic form of understanding the distinction between the two is in terms of mind independence & dependence. If a thing is objectively true or exists objectively, it does not require a mind for it to continue to be true or to exist. This is pretty easy to see in terms of physical things: unless you subscribe to an extreme form of skepticism about the existence of all things, you'll probably agree that even if no mind existed, physical things like the Earth and the Sun would still exist. On the other extreme, beliefs about personal tastes are pretty clearly subjective. If I say "this food is tasty to me", then clearly this is a mind-dependent fact or belief - it only is true (or not true) in relation to my mental activity. And thus subjective.
When you try to close in on the exact line between what is objective and what is subjective, though, it gets difficult. Take pain, for instance. Many philosophers believe that form of consequentialism is objectively true, or at least informs objectively true moral facts, and yet consequentialism bases what is good and what is not on how much pain or pleasure it causes. But pain seems to be dependent on mental states, so how can part of an objectively true fact?
There's no easy out here, so, like the definition of a chair, we might have to wave our hands a bit. I think a good rule of thumb in understanding whether something that is dependent on mental states is nonetheless "mind-independent" is to ask whether it is "response-dependent" or not. (Now we're wading into philosophy of mind stuff, which generally sucks & is difficult.) I'd suggest you look up response-dependence, 'cause it's rather tricky. But perhaps a good example would be the loss of something I value. Let's say my pet, whom I value, dies. I will feel sadness/loss because my pet died. The fact that I valued my pet is response-dependent; the pet is valued only because of my mental state of valuing it. As soon as I stop valuing the pet, it stops being a valued thing. You can't know whether I value my pet or not unless I tell you about my mental state (altho you can certainly make guesses). However, knowing that I value my pet, you can know I will feel loss or sadness when my pet dies. Sadness is not response-dependent. The sadness, while a mental state, exists because of the loss & the existence of my mental state of valuing the pet. I could, for instance, temporarily forget about the fact of the death of the pet, and still a sense of sadness because of loss. But the moment I forget about valuing the pet, the pet is no longer valued.
Is that clear? I doubt it.
------- On the vocabulary of philosophy - well, of course a large part of philosophy is about defining terms. But that doesn't mean that there isn't specific language that is already known that is used to help define terms further. "it logically follows", "epistemology", "non-cognitivism", "truth-value", "a priori", etc, etc. These are all basic terms that I would expect any philosophy major to know & understand - but it could take a full class period to fully explain the concept of non-cognitivism to an introductory class. Once they know it, though, it helps speed along the conversation tremendously. This is half the reason why the study of the history of philosophy is important - they developed the basic ideas & terminology that everything now is based upon.
When I debated applied ethical problems we didn't bother explaining what consequentialism was to the judges - if we had to start there, we'd never get anywhere - but we did describe, say, the Non-Identity Problem, which is basically defining a particular problem that results when you try to apply consequentialist theories to potential-but-not-yet-conceived humans.
If people aren't completely clear on basic philosophical terminology, such as "truth-value" then it's best they look up the term before deploying it, because anyone who has studied philosophy will have a very specific understanding of the word, and will be building arguments based upon it.
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quote:If people aren't completely clear on basic philosophical terminology, such as "truth-value" then it's best they look up the term before deploying it...
Not to burst your bubble or anything, Jhai, but you were the first person on this thread to "deploy" the term and are so far the only person who's used the hyphenated version of it. I believe charity demands that, if you're going to use specialized jargon, you get over the assumption that people will know specifically what you mean by it and either include your definition as you use the term or, more helpfully, replace the term altogether with a longer and more explanatory description of the phenomenon of which you're speaking.
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quote: If a thing is objectively true or exists objectively, it does not require a mind for it to continue to be true or to exist.
Okay, so Tom suggested starting with "harm is bad" to deduce an objective morality. But that's not good enough, as far as I can tell, since I don't think harming a tree or fungus is bad. As best as I can figure, he really means "harm to an entity with a conscious mind is bad".
Even that probably doesn't go far enough, since I don't think we consider bacteria "bad" for killing it's host. I'd imagine it's more like "An entity with a conscious mind causing harm to another entity with a conscious mind is bad".
Since this axiom twice requires a mind, I can't see how morality could possibly be objective by the definition given here.
Unless I suppose we are considering this as p-->q which is true always if p is false. So if no minds exists, morality could still exist, but is meaningless.
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quote:But that's not good enough, as far as I can tell, since I don't think harming a tree or fungus is bad.
You don't? Are you really completely neutral about the act of, say, destroying a tree for no reason? Does that only count as harm if the tree belonged to someone who did not wish it destroyed? I would argue that the tree is in fact harmed, and that this harm is bad.
Now, you can argue that this harm is only very slightly bad, and thus produces a net good, because there is a conscious actor who has benefited in some way from the destruction of the tree.
Of course, this means that harm is not only an integral part of the universe, but is absolutely unavoidable. Consequently, all our actions can at best only seek to minimize that harm; if we put an infinitely small value on the "life" of electrons, for example, we see nothing wrong with altering or destroying an infinite number of electrons so that one person might better enjoy a novel. It is worth noting that every time we produce a chemical reaction we are, in an infinitesimal way, hastening the heat-death of the universe (which is about as "bad" as something can be).
quote:So if no minds exists, morality could still exist, but is meaningless.
I would say that "meaning" is purely an internal property of a conscious mind, and that without a conscious mind nothing can be said to have meaning.
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quote:You don't? Are you really completely neutral about the act of, say, destroying a tree for no reason?
I've kicked mushrooms for no reason but to see the mushroom head go flying. I feel somewhat more appreciative of trees (from both cultural and personal sources I believe) but don't think that harming one is inherently immoral.
I suppose I don't know what to say about an objective morality that says that destroying an electron is immoral.
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But choosing to do something "bad" is not inherently immoral. In fact, it is unavoidable if you wish to breathe, eat, or walk on the ground.
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quote:Of course, this means that harm is not only an integral part of the universe, but is absolutely unavoidable. Consequently, all our actions can at best only seek to minimize that harm; if we put an infinitely small value on the "life" of electrons, for example, we see nothing wrong with altering or destroying an infinite number of electrons so that one person might better enjoy a novel. It is worth noting that every time we produce a chemical reaction we are, in an infinitesimal way, hastening the heat-death of the universe (which is about as "bad" as something can be).
This is a pretty ambiguous way of talking about harm though. After all, even though you might be destroying a tree, you could also say what you are really doing is rearranging its parts (many particles) into something else (a log perhaps). So you'd be helping the log as much as you are harming the tree. Then if you wanted to make a chair out of the log, you'd have to harm the log to generate the chair. And so on. Underlying that whole process are units of matter which are not harmed, but rather are merely rearranged. That makes it questionable how to measure the harm generated by those actions, or if any harm is actually occuring at all. It seems as if judging the harm requires us to make judgement calls about which object is better or more important than another. Is a tree better than a log because it is living, so the harm to it counts more? Is a chair better than a log because it is more functional, so it is moral to harm a log to create a chair?
quote:I would say that "meaning" is purely an internal property of a conscious mind, and that without a conscious mind nothing can be said to have meaning.
A potential dangerous thing for a materialist to say, although I suppose it depends on what sort of materialist you are... Posts: 8120 | Registered: Jul 2000
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I would say that you need to extend beyond harm is bad to a certain likelihood of harm is bad. For example, if you choose to drive drunk and no one gets hurt, the choice to drive drunk is still wrong. Because the chance that you could kill someone exists and the gain is too low.
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quote:But choosing to do something "bad" is not inherently immoral. In fact, it is unavoidable if you wish to breathe, eat, or walk on the ground.
Then allow me to rephrase:
I suppose I don't know what to say about an objective morality that says that destroying an electron is bad.
Edit: and related to Tresopax's point, you can never actually "destroy" an electron. So why would it be "bad" to change the state of an electron?
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Tom, I see your point to some extent, but if I used a word you didn't know in a sentence, would you ask me to define it, or just go google it? If we were discussing a high-level concept in physics, for instance, would you expect someone to explain what they mean by the term "work" or "force" (which are used quite differently in physics than they are in non-technical English), or would the assumption be that the people in the conversation ought to know the basic terms? You'll note that I do explain terms like "mind-independent" or "response-dependent", which only someone who has studied epistemology or meta-ethics are likely to know.
----- Xavier, go back and read what I wrote about mind independence - it's not identical to "divorced entirely from any and all mental states". Take, say, human-induced global warming (as a hypothetical if you don't believe it actually exists). This global warming can be said to only exist because of people's mental states - if we didn't have mental states that made us want to do things that released carbon into the atmosphere, then it wouldn't exist. Yet the existence of human-induced global warming is an objective fact & mind-independent (remember, hypothetical thought-experiment if you don't actually believe that it exists).
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quote:Originally posted by scholarette: I would say that you need to extend beyond harm is bad to a certain likelihood of harm is bad. For example, if you choose to drive drunk and no one gets hurt, the choice to drive drunk is still wrong. Because the chance that you could kill someone exists and the gain is too low.
This is why simple utilitarianism isn't really believed by anyone. But it's a useful simplification for quick & dirty hypotheticals.
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quote:Originally posted by Mike: I'm ok with saying that moral statements have no truth value. Unless you're saying something like, "I think killing babies is wrong", or "In this culture killing babies is wrong" — those are true. Does that make me a metaethical moral relativist? I've never been a big fan of labels.
Um, both of your examples are moral statements. So if you think they have truth value, then you're at the very least a moral-cognitivist. It sounds to me like you subscribe to moral relativism (if you believe statements like "in this culture blah is good" have truth value).
Very well, I'll amend that to "I'm ok with saying that absolute moral statements of the form 'killing babies is wrong' have no truth value, unless the answer to the question 'wrong according to whom?' is evident."
A bit of a nitpick here, but I think it's relevant. In fact, I think it will play a significant role in my more lengthy reply to you either tonight or tomorrow, Jhai. Anyway...
The statement "I think killing babies is wrong" is not a statement about morality but about what is being thought. Thus, truth-value is applicable without question. It is true (or false) that I think killing babies is wrong - regardless of whether or not that thought itself is actually wrong either objectively or relative to society or whatever else.
Now on to an actual moral statement: "Killing babies is wrong." What you'd really like to know is my/our response to whether or not this kind of statement has truth-value. The problem is that, for the moral subjectivist, answering this question directly is incredibly misleading, much akin the afore mentioned "And how long now have you been beating your wife?" Answering with a simple yes or no (and without redefining "objectivity" more subjectively*) presupposes either objectivism or obviously flawed subjectivism.
When I (and apparently Mike as well) make a moral statement such as "Killing babies is wrong", I do not mean what I say at face value. Unlike Mike, however, I disagree that "according to whom" is presupposed. Prefacing such statements with something like "I believe" might seem sufficient on the surface (and indeed, it allows for unquestionable truth-value), but this still inadequately describes my subjective understanding of morality. Rather, what I am really saying is "I am personally obligated to think and act as if killing babies is wrong", and my response to whether or not this kind of statement has truth-value is clearly "yes." Yes, this accurately describes me, or no, it does not. (What drives that specific obligation, btw, is a separate discussion, one that I'm skeptical would be very productive given such widely varying opinions on what justifies specific moral beliefs.)
*More on this later.
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quote: Now on to an actual moral statement: "Killing babies is wrong." What you'd really like to know is my/our response to whether or not this kind of statement has truth-value. The problem is that, for the moral subjectivist, answering this question directly is incredibly misleading, much akin the afore mentioned "And how long now have you been beating your wife?" Answering with a simple yes or no (and without redefining "objectivity" more subjectively*) presupposes either objectivism or obviously flawed subjectivism.
This isn't true for many (most?) moral subjecivists, actually. For instance, take cultural relativism. A cultural relativist will answer yes or no depending on their culture. The relativism simply means that they do not believe that others will necessarily have the same truth-value for the statement. A yes or no simply does not "presuppose either objectivism or obviously flawed subjectivism". I suspect your understanding of what is meant by "moral subjectivism" is flawed. I'd refer you to an article discussing the definition of the two, but you said you didn't want that.
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quote:That makes it questionable how to measure the harm generated by those actions, or if any harm is actually occuring at all. It seems as if judging the harm requires us to make judgement calls about which object is better or more important than another.
I would agree wholeheartedly with both of these statements.
quote:related to Tresopax's point, you can never actually "destroy" an electron. So why would it be "bad" to change the state of an electron?
Well, it depends whether changing the state of an electron can be considered to be "harming" that electron. The smaller you get, the harder the determination of harm becomes. That doesn't mean, however, that the logic breaks down; it just means that determining harm is very difficult at the extremes.
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quote:I'd refer you to an article discussing the definition of the two, but you said you didn't want that.
I'd appreciate the reference. I've been reading a lot on Wikipedia, but it does more defining than explaining.
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In mathematics, a string of symbols may or may not have truth value. Even well-formed (i.e. parsable) strings can lack truth value.
In natural language, as you no doubt know, things are often more ambiguous and dependent on context. As such, your contention
quote: If you believe that the statement "it's wrong for you to do X" is ever true or false - relative to a culture or not - then it has truth-value.
is incorrect. It's incorrect because the statement "it's wrong for you to do X" can mean different things in different contexts. Two meanings, for example:
1. It's wrong for you to do X [in this culture]. 2. It's [absolutely] wrong for you to do X [full stop].
My point of view is that [1] has truth value: it may be true or false depending on X and the culture (it might even have the same truth value in all known cultures!); [2] does not have truth value: it parses, but is nonsensical because the premise is incorrect (the premise being that anything can be absolutely right or wrong, and that "absolutely wrong" in fact has a meaning at all).
In short, truth value applies to the meaning of the sentence, in context, not to the string of words that comprise it.
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quote:I'd refer you to an article discussing the definition of the two, but you said you didn't want that.
I'd appreciate the reference. I've been reading a lot on Wikipedia, but it does more defining than explaining.
This article has a very good, clear discussion of moral objectivism vs. subjectivism. I think the author also does a very good job in explaining things using plenty of examples and non-dense text. The article is actually about moral anti-realism, which is the position that moral facts do not exist mind-independently - either they don't exist at all (non-cognitivism and error theory) or they exist, but are mind-dependent. That latter bit is where subjectivism comes from.
At the bottom of the article there's a fair number of links to other articles on the SEP dealing with metaethics. They vary in clarity, but all (to my knowledge) are accurate and quite informative.
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Mike, that is not the standard way of evaluating whether a statement has truth-value, at least in all philosophy classes I have been in.
Edit: to expand a bit, if you are, say, a cultural relativist, the statement "It is always wrong for anyone to do X" always has a truth-value. And that truth value is that the statement is false.
An utterance that doesn't have a truth-value would be something like a growl when someone approaches a hungry person's food. There's communication happening there (you're warning someone off), but the utterance doesn't have a false or true value to it. Moral non-cognivists basically say that all moral statements are growls (to "bad" things) or purrs (to "good" things). When you say "it is wrong to do X" what you're really saying is something like "X! Yucky! Ick!". According to the moral non-cognivists.
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Note that I didn't use the statement "it is always wrong for anyone to do X"; I used the statement "it is absolutely wrong to do X" — absolute in the sense that there is an objective point of view from which doing X is wrong. If you don't believe that such a point of view exists, then it doesn't make sense to talk about whether something is wrong from said point of view. "It is absolutely wrong to do X" is not false. Nor true.
Now, including the premise explicitly in the statement changes things:
It is [absolutely] wrong to do X.
There exists an objective point of view from which it is wrong to do X.
The first has no truth value and the second has truth value and is false. Do you see the distinction?
You're right when you say that "Ick!" etc. lack truth value, but there are many ways a sentence can lack truth value, and using the term to refer only to a specific kind of statement (growls/purrs) is unreasonably restrictive.
Also, the growls and purrs idea is an interesting way of looking at it, to be sure, but it doesn't mean anything substantively different (to me, at least) that interpreting "it is wrong to do X" as "the idea of someone doing X give me icky feelings", which definitely does have truth value. 6 of one, 2 pi of the other.
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The non-existence of absolute wrongness and the non-existence of unicorns are of two entirely different categories.
Edit: the statement "it is [absolutely] wrong to do X" is neither true nor false for the same reason the question "do you still beat your husband?" cannot be answered adequately with a yes or no.
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The "beat your husband" question is not at all - either linguistically or philosophically - like the existence or non-existence of a property.
"Absolute wrongness" is a property being applied to an action. If you don't want to talk about imaginary unicorns, then imagine a color that doesn't actually exist, or some other property that doesn't exist. Say, that sweater is eoraid, where eoraid is a color that doesn't actually exist. The statement "the sweater is eoraid" is false because the property eoraid doesn't actually exist, and thus can't be assigned to any thing.
I'm not going to bother arguing this with you any more, but right now you aren't displaying a correct understanding of the term "truth-value" as used in philosophy.
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I think you're misunderstanding, Jhai. What Mike is saying is that there IS truth-value in the statement "I think this sweater is eoraid."
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I think what Mike is arguing is that "absolute wrongness" isn't actually a property at all - it's just some meaningless gibberish. That would mean that "it is absolutely wrong to do X" is not a proposition at all, and thus doesn't have a truth-value.
A more comparable example would be a math question asking if "1 5 = 17". Is this true or false? It is neither because " " doesn't mean anything here, so the whole statement isn't really a proposition at all.
----
I'd have my doubts about any claim that "absolute wrongness" is meaningless though. It certainly SEEMS like I know what it means. Is there some very compelling reason to believe what seems to me to be meaningful is not a meaningful concept?
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: I think you're misunderstanding, Jhai. What Mike is saying is that there IS truth-value in the statement "I think this sweater is eoraid."
There's a difference between saying "I think <blank>" and just "<blank>". I'm referring to the latter.
---- Tres, if Mike is saying that "absolute wrongness" is gibberish, then he's going to have a hell of a time also saying that relative or subjective wrongness isn't gibberish. You can't have it both ways.
The two main schools of thought regarding gibberish & moral propositions is that either the speakers are only expressing their emotions (the growling of non-cognitivism) or that they do think they're talking about something real, but it's actually hogwash, in the same way that doctors talked about how the humors affected health back in the day (error theory). Both schools of thought deny the existence of moral propositions, but one thinks that you're just emoting and the other one thinks you're earnestly talking about something that doesn't exist. Neither one allows for some moral propositions to be real and some to not be.
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To use an example from mathematics again, sometimes we want to prove a proposition that states that certain objects have a certain property. However, in order to do that we have to first verify that the property is well-defined. Tres's example is pretty close to what I mean.
quote: Tres, if Mike is saying that "absolute wrongness" is gibberish, then he's going to have a hell of a time also saying that relative or subjective wrongness isn't gibberish. You can't have it both ways.
Then I'll have a hell of a time. I've already been over what I see as the difference between absolute and relative moral statements.
Of course, if you're done arguing, that's fine too. I hope you don't still think I don't understand the meaning of the term "truth-value", though.
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As it relates to philosophy, I do. Or else you don't have a clear understanding of the differences between objective, subjective, absolute, and relative as they relate to philosophy. It's likely the latter, actually, since you seem to use objective & absolute interchangeably, as well as subjective & relative.
Either way, your position is not logically valid.
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"I think you're misunderstanding, Jhai. What Mike is saying is that there IS truth-value in the statement "I think this sweater is eoraid."
There's a difference between saying "I think <blank>" and just "<blank>". I'm referring to the latter."
I'm not really sure I understood your response here, but I am going to agree with the statement that there is truth-value in the statement "I think this sweater is eoraid", though the truth value may be different than "This sweater is eoraid" in that he can he can think that the sweater is eoraid but it may not be, and whether or not he is truly thinks this is also assigns truth-value to the statement. More interesting, with regards to gibberish, are questions of whether or not he has a mind or ontology. Let's change the phrase to make this easier: "The present king of France thinks this sweater is eoraid." Given that there's no present king of France to whom one is referring, then does that statement have meaning?
Well, I always found that type of question interesting in my phil. of language class.
It's actually pretty easy to see why he's right if you write it out in logical syntax. Luckily for me, our Advanced Logic class was taught by the same person who taught philosophy of language, so we got a good dose of that along with all the logic. And she liked math too. Good times.
(Edit: my response was just a shorter form of what you basically said - that Tom's statement & Mike's statement are not saying the same thing)
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Did you guys look at it using logical syntax or words? I've never taken a philosophy of language course, so I've only seen it from the logic side of things, where it seemed quite clear.
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I mean, did you use words to describe what you were talking about, or a more formal system like predicate logic or the like? For discussion of language & meaning it can be quite useful to write in a formal logic system, since it's far more precise than English. For instance, there's about, um, 12 ways (maybe more? It's been awhile) to translate Lincoln's "You can fool some of the people all the time..." quotation into predicate logic, and each one has a different meaning entirely.
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We generally avoided symbolic logic in that class unless it was necessary. If we felt we couldn't get the meaning across in English, or it would be clearer in symbolic, then we would translate into symbolic, but otherwise we used words.
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I would have found that extremely frustrating. I do find it illogical, unless the point was to keep the class accessible to those who haven't spent a semester or two studying logic. Then it would have just been unfortunate.
Our Phil of Language class had Logic as a prereq. Since Logic was a requirement of the major anyways, it wasn't that large a problem.
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quote:Originally posted by Jhai: As it relates to philosophy, I do. Or else you don't have a clear understanding of the differences between objective, subjective, absolute, and relative as they relate to philosophy. It's likely the latter, actually, since you seem to use objective & absolute interchangeably, as well as subjective & relative.
That may be. It'd be great if you'd explain or point me toward an explanation of the differences between objective and absolute and between subjective and relative.
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Thanks, that's helpful. So, as far as I can tell on those two axes I believe that morals are both relative (like tallness) and subjective (unlike tallness). I've gotta say, I really don't understand the subjective-absolute position, so I'm not convinced of the orthogonality of the axes (does this mean that morality is entirely in people's heads, but it manifests itself in precisely the same way for everyone? — I don't think I know anyone who believes that). I'm also still fuzzy on what exactly it means for something to be mind-dependent. Perhaps a link for that too?
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posted
See the main Anti-Realism article for a discussion of mind-dependence. It's not an easy concept, tho.
A subjective-absolutist position could be something like an "ideal viewer" who determines morality. So, consider a possible God. He hasn't made morality to be an objective fact of the universe, but He has a subjective view of whether an action is moral or not. He's also an ideal viewer of all actions, since he knows everything and is perfectly impartial & all. A moral subjective-absolutist position would say that what God views as morally right is right. But it's still subjective because it's dependent on God's mind. There's a bit more detail about this in the same Anti-Realism article.
quote:For discussion of language & meaning it can be quite useful to write in a formal logic system...
You know, I loathe predicate logic. Can you provide me with an example of when it's actually useful to use predicate logic to discuss a real-world philosophical question instead of, y'know, actual words?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
What is this "real-world philosophical question" thing you speak of?
Seriously, though, predicate logic (or other logical systems) is useful whenever you need to be extremely, extremely clear what a statement or argument means, or whether a statements follow from previous statements.
Complicated arguments can come up in all fields, but the most often in metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of the mind, philosophy of religion, and epistemology. And, of course, in the fundamentals of mathematics & different proofs in math.
quote:Complicated arguments can come up in all fields, but the most often in metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of the mind, philosophy of religion, and epistemology.
But how many of those cannot be expressed in actual words?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
I'm sure they almost all COULD be expressed in actual words, but words can have multiple meanings and sentences can have multiple interpretations. When you're making (or refuting) an important point, you often need to be more clear than "plain english" allows.
(If I was really clever I would have found a way to respond to your point using as ambiguous language as possible, but it's late and I'm too tired)
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quote:Complicated arguments can come up in all fields, but the most often in metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of the mind, philosophy of religion, and epistemology.
But how many of those cannot be expressed in actual words?
Remember that thread that we had about Arrow's Impossibility Theorem? The one where it took about twenty back & forths before everyone was on the same page on what it meant? Arrow writes all out in about two pages in logical syntax so that, if you understand the terminology, you'd completely understand what he's saying without need for clarification, and why it must be true.
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quote:When you're making (or refuting) an important point, you often need to be more clear than "plain english" allows.
When are important points made in metaphysics?
I've actually found that forcing my opponents to systematically break down their argument into "logi-speak" helps them to realize how ridiculous (and useless) their metaphysical argument really is.
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I believe charity demands that, if you're going to use specialized jargon, you get over the assumption that people will know specifically what you mean by it and either include your definition as you use the term or, more helpfully, replace the term altogether with a longer and more explanatory description of the phenomenon of which you're speaking.
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