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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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?
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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?
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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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