|
rudatron posted:It's considered a knock down proof by people unfamiliar with the subject matter - axioms cannot prove themselves, this isn't something unique to positivism, Godel would have something to say about that. Yes, but this is a blunting of the verificationist sword - you can no longer say that certain statements about metaphysical states of affairs are meaningless full stop, you can only really say that you are unwilling to accept the axiomatic system under which they are meaningful. Which is more Carnap than Ayer; not nearly as flashy, because you can't go around telling people they're fundamentally and systematically mistaken about what they think they mean when they speak. That is, it is not the positivists reliance on the principle of verification that is a problem, it is their insistence that it is the only justifiable axiom. Edit, to respond to the OP: olin posted:It appears to me impossible to believe in any type of ontological thruths without also a belief in an absolute being. What do you mean by 'ontological truth,' and why do you think our epistemic relationship with such things is dependent on theism? One simple way to read 'ontological truths' is just 'facts about what things exist' in which case it looks like you're saying that we can't know that there is an external world unless there is a God to vouchsafe that belief for us. Which is just Descartes all over again. Not that that's a problem, it's just that Descartes wasn't the last word in that debate. Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 12:41 on May 19, 2016 |
#
¿
May 19, 2016 12:28
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 16:07 |
|
|
olin posted:I'm saying that eternally existing truths, or you could just say truth, are/is God. I do not mean that as an equivocation. God is the collection of all eternally existent being. I don't understand what this means. 'Truth' is the name we give to a certain kind of relationship between propositions and the world: a well-formed proposition describes a certain state of affairs, and if that state of affairs obtains in the world then the proposition in true. For example, the proposition 'Obama is the president' is true just in case Obama is the president. It is very strange to call that relationship 'God,' but I guess strangeness alone isn't necessarily a reason to reject a view. More importantly, how do you expect this to give you firmer ground for moral knowledge than the person who does not see divinity in that relation? What extra metaphysical/epistemic work is the divinity doing?
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 15:55
|
|
|
olin posted:I explained this above. I believe in a personal, changeless, unbelievably powerful absolute being who was the creator of the universe. Admittedly, I probably miswrote the OP and shouldn't have been intentionally vague. My obfuscation has just provided confusion. It just that I was not trying to start a "does God exist?" DD thread as we all know how well receive that poo poo is on this forum. One's choice of moral system probably has to be comparitive, and you still haven't explained how your moral system follows from theism. Unless you endorse some such system, we'll be at a loss as to what you would find persuasive. So if you're not up to deriving moral facts from theism, at least tell us how you expect a derivation of moral facts to proceed. e.g. what kinds of reasons are acceptable? Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 16:24 on May 19, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 16:09
|
|
|
olin posted:I find the lack of objectivity in non-theistic moral systems to make them unfeasible. To murder a random person is wrong. That is not merely an opinion but a fact. I couldn't ascribe to an ethical system that just says "Well, I don't want to murder a person because it would make me feel bad therefore I don't do it." This survey (from 2009) of professional philosophers indicates that ~73% of them are atheists, ~56% are moral realists, and ~66% are cognitivists about moral judgment. So you're operating from a mistaken premise; it is simply false that the majority of non-theistic moral systems have given up on objectivity. Edit: I know that doesn't follow directly from the numbers, if, for example, the 15% who identified as theists swung entirely for realism and cognitivism, but even then there are at least some theists who are not divine command theorists, and we should count their moral systems as 'non-theistic' as well, most likely. Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 17:01 on May 19, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 16:56
|
|
|
olin posted:Taking my definition of God, all goodness, love and truth, your question reads "What if God was not God." It's nonsensical. 'God' isn't doing any conceptual work here. If a non-theist thinks that goodness, love and truth are positive values then they come to the same (normative, if not metaphysical) conclusions.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 16:59
|
|
|
Here's the correlation for atheism/theism and anti-realism/realism from the survey I mentioned a few posts ago.code:
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 17:10
|
|
|
olin posted:Rejecting hypotheticals and thought experiments because "they can't happen in real life" is antithetical to doing philosophy. Also, lets say ISIS captured you and a bunch of other prisoners. The terms of release for all the prisoners were for you to kill the child prisoner. Otherwise they would behead you all in one week. A refutation of utilitarianism, even if you had one, is not the same thing as an argument that non-theistic moral systems are even usually non-objective. That is the crucial claim that you've made about theism and moral philosophy, and so far the only support you've given for this position is a story about a friend of yours. Edit: You have two argumentative routes available to you: either you can argue as a sociological fact that non-theistic moral philosophers are anti-realists about moral facts, or you can make the metaethical claim that non-theistic moral realists are committed to a contradiction, or that they have insufficient justification for their positions. I have demonstrated that the former claim is false as a matter of fact. So far you have not attempted to produce an argument towards the latter route. Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 17:16 on May 19, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 17:13
|
|
|
The Unholy Ghost posted:Hello hi sort of butting in here but I have a question regarding the KCA. No, I think the conclusion of the argument is supposed to be that an infinite chain of dependent entities is inconceivable/impossible, and therefore that there must be a non-dependent entity to ground the chain. Call that entity 'God' and you're like halfway there I guess.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 17:19
|
|
|
olin posted:I agree, I have some research to do. That's okay! Ghost of Reagan Past's link from the first reply to this thread would be a good place to start. Who What Now posted:A problem with the KCA (one of many) is that it provides no means of knowing anything about the thing it calls "God", much less that it's specifically Craig's version of the Christian God. I think this is right. Most proofs of God's existence, even if they establish the existence of some entity, fail to establish that that thing possesses all of the properties it would take for a reasonable person to call it divine.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 17:22
|
|
|
Brainiac Five posted:Your statement that people "in a state of ignorance and prejudice cannot be maximally happy" is built on an adherence to a prior rule, deontology, rather than purely utilitarian principles about maximizing happiness. Unless he intends that to be an empirical claim, ofc?
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 17:34
|
|
|
olin posted:He pretty convincingly argues that If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who is changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful. Those qualities would meet most definitions of divinity. Here is Craig's argument (Call it argument A) that the cause of the universe must be a person: 1.) The universe has a beginning (from the first part of the KCA). 2.) The cause of the universe must be eternal (again, from the first part of the KCA). 3.) Anything that has a beginning is not eternal. 4.) If a cause is sufficient for an effect, and the cause is eternal, then the effect is eternal. _4a.) (Premise for reductio) The universe has a material cause. _4b.) A material cause is sufficient for its effect. _4c.) The universe is eternal (This is a contradiction with 1 and 3) 5.) The universe does not have a material cause (from 4a-4c) 6.) All causes are either material or personal. 7.) The universe has a personal cause. (From disjunctive syllogism of 5 and 6) The problem with this argument is that 'sufficiency' goes both ways. Here's another argument (argument B): 1.) An eternal sufficient cause must have an eternal effect. 2.) God's will to create "a world with a beginning" is sufficient to produce it (Denying this would probably get you into trouble) 3.) God's will to create "a world with a beginning" is eternal (Or else God changed his mind, a bad result). 4.) "A world with a beginning" is eternal (from 1,2,3) 5.) (4) contradicts (3) from Argument A. So one of the premises 1, 2, or 3 from Argument B must be false. Edit: I should say that this reply is not mine; I got it from a Philosophy of Religion professor that I was a TA for some number of years ago. Brainiac Five posted:If you can definitely objectively quantify happiness, you've got more important things to do than engage in this silly argument. Publish, publish, publish, drat it. Presumably, a utilitarian will want to identify 'happiness' by ostension. Either by pointing at a bundle of behaviors or pointing at a neural correlate would be sufficient. "This is the thing I'm interested in, maiximize this!" is what I imagine them saying. Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 17:57 on May 19, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 17:52
|
|
|
Brainiac Five posted:Oh, well, see, I was going to avoid any intimations that utilitarianism tends towards a horrific police state, but then you went ahead and made that argument for me. This doesn't follow, or at least not obviously so. If you want me to take an argument seriously, you have to give me more than just the conclusion. Brainiac Five posted:This doesn't actually address the argument I made, in favor of the presumption that obviously the "neural correlate" of someone who is free from prejudice, assuming that this can actually be determined and generalized, will be one that produces greater happiness than that of a prejudiced person. Indeed, someone who lives in a prejudiced society but considers that prejudice to be evil seems intuitively more likely to be unhappy, depressed, or anxious than someone who conforms to societal norms. The issue that utilitarianism is in many ways counter to liberal and leftist values remains. It will not come as a shock to a utilitarian that particular moral problems have empirical solutions that can only be imperfectly predicted from the armchair. This is how the theory is supposed to work. That utilitarianism fails to rule out certain forms of social organization or personal behavior a priori is a fairly weak criticism of it, seeing as that's the whole point.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:10
|
|
|
olin posted:That is not a good representation of his argument. From an Atheist site I got this: I was trying to be charitable. The argument as you've presented it is obviously invalid; what is (4) supposed to follow from? Edit: I don't want to read from your atheist site. I read Craig's book. I'm happy to look at any argument you care to reproduce here, though.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:12
|
|
|
Brainiac Five posted:How are you measuring "neural correlates", dude? I'm not. I'm not even a utilitarian, I'm just not convinced your particular criticism of the theory ultimately works. Anyway, I think a utilitarian of a reasonable cast might say: the metaphysical ground of normative facts is neural. But our access to neural facts is imperfect, so our epistemic access to neural facts comes through observation of behavior, which is (we assume) correlated with neural facts. Or they might think the behavior is the metaphysical ground, maybe. Either way, pointing out problems with epistemic access to the ground of normative facts is at best a criticism of a moral theory as an operational guide to behavior, and does not address the truth or falsity of that theory's normative claims. I've said this before in other threads, but we should be careful to to conflate epistemic and metaphysical problems. Brainiac Five posted:Oh my god, dude, can you respond to the actual argument? Like, how do we get away from the potential conclusion that the increase in happiness from gays being oppressed is greater than that from gay equality if that's an empirical conclusion, without escaping the bounds of utilitarianism? A priori? You don't, I don't think. A committed utilitarian would have to accept that there is a possible world in which that's how the normative facts shake out. But they can maintain that while simultaneously thinking they have good evidence that that world is not the actual world.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:19
|
|
|
olin posted:+ This first cause must also be personal because there are only two accepted types of This is the distinction between mechanical and personal cause that my argument was a reply to. Ultimately, the reasons that Craig thinks that a 'scientific'/mechanical cause cannot be the First Cause apply equally to personal causes, on any reasonable theory of what a personal cause actually is.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:21
|
|
|
Brainiac Five posted:No, dude, I'm saying that in order to measure happiness from neural correlates you're probably going to mandate regular brain scans for representative samples or whatever and that's basically an absurdist police state. Doing it from behaviors is less absurdist as far as policing goes, but still a loving police state. Maybe! Or it might turn out that trying to carefully track every individual's personal utility (through brain scans or hidden cameras or commisars or whatever) actually is not the most effective way to maximize that value. I'm inclined to think that, if utilitarianism were true, it would not entail that we should institute a police state. It seems like that'd be a pretty unlikely way to make people happy, anyway. Edit: I mean, it sounds like you're saying that, for any bundle of behaviors and dispositions that we decide to call 'happiness', it follows that they way to get the greatest number of people to express those behaviors would be to criminalize failing to do so. This just seems like a pretty big inferential leap.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:27
|
|
|
Brainiac Five posted:Okay, so we reject empirical attempts to measure the phenomena we are trying to maximize, as utilitarians. Am I reading this correctly? No, not necessarily. For example, a utilitarian might think that a good strategy would be to hire a bunch of sociologists and statisticians for the central government and pay them to use accepted social psych methods to determine what would make for effective social policy. I'm just saying that trying to measure the phenomena by brutally authoritarian methods might be contrary to trying to maximize them.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:31
|
|
|
Who What Now posted:This disproves an infinite God right from the get-go. So if your god isn't infinite, what caused it? I think you might be (wrongly) conflating 'infinite' and 'eternal.'
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:33
|
|
|
Who What Now posted:It's possible, and if so I'll admit it. Well, the sort of infinity that Craig thinks is impossible is one where a thing or a group of things has infinitely many temporal parts, while he thinks that God created time along with the universe, at which point he began to exist within it. I think. I have a hard time following it. Admittedly, he does need to go through quite a bit of mental gymnastics to prevent God from being subject to the same anti-infinity argument as the Universe. You might be right that there's a problem here, but it's at least one that Craig is aware of and takes himself to have responded to sufficiently.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:43
|
|
|
Brainiac Five posted:Okay, but in reality you can't measure behaviors like that without extremely intrusive surveillance. So your conception makes it so that utilitarianism cannot actually know whether it has successfully maximized the phenomena it is measuring, in cases that are similar to real ones rather than idiotic hypotheticals. Well, imagine that we get together as utilitarians and decide that the behaviors we're interested in are the disposition to report "yes that is pleasant" or "no that is unpleasant" to various stimuli. This is something that psych and social psych nerds already spend a lot of time and money studying, and I don't feel like it contributes to a feeling that I'm being constantly surveilled.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:50
|
|
|
Brainiac Five posted:This is one of those idiotic hypothecticals. How's that?
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 18:53
|
|
|
olin posted:The hotel argument points out the absurdity of infinite material things. If the hotel has infinite rooms and they are all occupied and then a new customer comes the manger can still except new guests. He has infinite rooms. Everytime a new customer comes and can give them a room and move tenet in room 1 to room 2 an room 2 to room 3 etc. Even though every room is occupied he can always except new customers. And even though new customers are checking in he always has the same number of customers. Infinite. 1000 more check in, still the same number of customers. Even if an infinite amount of new customers can he could still accommodate all of them. and he would still have the same number of customers. Yes, but for the argument to work it has to apply not only to synchronic collections of particulars but also to diachronic chains of events states of affairs. So since Craig thinks that God has existed within physical time since the universe existed, and that God but not the universe is eternal, it looks very much like Craig is forced to say something like 'before God created the Universe, he existed outside time,' which is something that is hard to make sense of. Hence the mental gymnastics. Although, re-reading it, this post looks more like a reply to WWN than to myself, since I haven't so far disputed the first half of the KCA. Was that the intention?
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 19:00
|
|
|
olin posted:Demonstrate an example like the hotel argument about eternal spiritual being. Well, there's the obvious one: 1.) The cardinality of any set is greater than the cardinality of any of its subsets. 2.) To say that God is eternal is to say that God has an infinite number of temporal parts, and no first temporal part. 3.) The cardinality of the set of all of God's temporal parts is infinite. (From 2) 4.) There is a proper subset of the set of all of God's temporal parts which has an infinite cardinality. 5.) 3 and 4 contradict 1. Since Craig thinks (1) is a logical necessity, and indeed depends on it for the first half of the KCA, and 3 and 4 follow directly from 2, premise 2 must be false. But if so then it's not clear what 'eternal' means.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 19:06
|
|
|
Brainiac Five posted:You can't get a loving observation from statistical manipulations. Idiot. It seems like you're arguing that we are totally in the dark as to what makes people feel pleasure and what makes people feel pain, or even how to discover the answer to that question. Is this your position?
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 19:17
|
|
|
Brainiac Five posted:What in the actual gently caress. I am trying very hard to determine what your position is, and I'm finding it difficult. I swear it's in good faith. My task is made harder when you post stuff like this rather than an actual response to the substance of my comments. I'm getting that you're frustrated with the direction this conversation has taken, but not much else. If you don't want to talk about it, just say so.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 19:24
|
|
|
Brainiac Five posted:No, I'm stunned that a post where I said that sensual pleasures are not the sum totality of pleasure is taken as "we cannot measure pleasure or pain in any way". I was hoping you weren't a total pinhead. I don't recall you ever making an argument about types of pleasure, at least explicitly. But even if you had, it's not clear to me that it would be any more difficult to determine the likely causes of those pleasures than the sensual ones. You have been trying to construe my position as entailing that utilitarians identify happiness with an unmeasurable quantity, but any time I suggest a candidate quantity and ask you to confirm that you think it is unmeasurable, you apparently get quite upset. So frankly I'm at a loss as to what your contentions actually are. Additionally, there's really no need for insults. I'm starting to think you're using indignation as a cover for your lack of a convincing reply.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2016 20:50
|
|
|
rudatron posted:The people I don't get are the atheist moral realists, which according to that poll posted, is definitely something that exists in philosophy departments. Why bother? The creation of moral realism was there to save the idea of god from the problem of evil, absent god you no longer need moral realism. I think people just like the idea of their morals being 'objective', because they're taught that subjective = bad and objective = good, which is important for theories of knowledge, but a bad way to think about ethics. I think I don't understand the historical/teleological claim here - plato was certainly a moral realist (in that he thought value-laden things like The Form Of The Good take, actually existed), but it'd be a stretch to think that he was reacting to the threat of atheism. Maybe you're thinking of something in particular? Anyway, even if it turns out that moral realism was invented to fulfill a purpose that atheists have since given up on, but this doesn't obviously bear on the question of the truth or falsity of the position. Plus, if I can name-drop Plato again, a lot of people think that the Euthyphro dilemma shows that theism is actually a major threat to moral realism as it's normally construed. In contemporary philosophy, there are something like five major ethical theories in play: consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, contractualism, and divine command theory. Only the last of those depends on a deity, and even that one can be thought of as a species of a more general command theory, in which moral facts depend on the commands of some group or individual, divine or otherwise. The vast majority of published work in the field of ethics makes no mention of God at all. rudatron posted:I also think you can solve the problems of utilitarianism if you think of pleasures/enjoyment not as a continuous metric, but as an infinite ordered set of satisfied desires. You can starve 1 to feed 100, but you can't make 100 content by starving 1 - the 'addition' is in different dimensions, and the 'hunger' dimension takes priority over the 'entertainment' dimension. Of course, that reduces some of the appeal of utilitarianism, by getting rid of a single metric of 'utility' that everything can add or subtract from, and you have to go through the hard work of deciding the ordering of those desires, but that classic simplification is what introduces the problems of the utility monster in the first place. Keeping your terms separate is probably for the best. Yeah, could be. I have no major objection to this version of utilitarianism. But there are a lot of ways to formulate a utilitarian theory. I'm not actually an expert in ethics, but I think some of my ethicist friends have said something like this maybe. Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 17:30 on May 20, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 20, 2016 16:14
|
|
|
Zaradis posted:Subjective morality clearly exists, that's true. But it provides no grounds from which one can hold others morally accountable. If our subjective moral beliefs clash then there is nothing to be done because neither of us are right or wrong since there is no objective basis from which those moral beliefs can be judged. Shared subjectivity does not make it any less subjective. That your subjective beliefs are important does not give you any right to hold others accountable according to those beliefs. Holding others accountable for your subjective moral beliefs is just as absurd as claiming that everyone ought to like the color orange because you like the color orange. The point is not that morality does not exist as a concept, it's that if morality is only subjective belief then no one is in any position to hold others morally accountable, which is the entire point of morality. Can you explain what you mean by 'objective,' and how a higher power, if it existed, would give us a moral theory of that sort?
|
|
#
¿
May 20, 2016 17:19
|
|
|
Zaradis posted:In my opinion there is no such thing as true objectivity. Sure, okay, but unless you tell me what meaning you intend that word to have, I can't know what it is you think doesn't exist. Like, here a pretty naive reading: objective facts are facts about things (objects, if you like) in the world. Subjective facts are facts about individuals' experiences of those objects. But this, or anything like it, probably isn't what you mean, because it entails that there are no facts about the world. Most people would take this as a bad result. So I assume it's gotta be something else, but what?
|
|
#
¿
May 20, 2016 17:37
|
|
|
God 'creating morality' doesn't make sense to me either. Pretty much everyone thinks that moral facts supervene on the totality of the physical facts. If that's true, then a hypothetical deity could no more make a physically identical universe with a different distribution of values than they could (e.g.) make a physically identical universe in which the theory if evolution is false. If you think that objective morality has to be something totally independent of the physical universe, then I can see why an atheist would have to be skeptical of it, but almost nobody thinks that.
|
|
#
¿
May 20, 2016 17:54
|
|
|
Zaradis posted:Please don't take my words out of context. I told you exactly what I believe objectivity is. The nature of experience is entirely subjective, and since experience is all that we can possibly know, feel, be aware of, etc. then if objectivity exists we cannot know it. We cannot know facts about things in the world, we can only know facts about our experiences, but that it seems that we experience things outside of ourselves does not mean that we actually do (i.e. Kant). This is simply the nature of subjective experience, and when a bunch of them agree on something we call it objectivity because it's more comforting to believe that we know something objectively than accept that we can't. Okay, yeah sure: universal radical skeptics have ground for refusing to assent to any objective theory of ethics. But it also means that you are barred from assenting to any conclusions from e.g. the natural sciences. I suspect that if a moral realist gets an interlocutor to agree that moral facts are on the same epistemic level as physical facts, they'd count that as a win. E: (Also you've mischaracterized Kant's position re: knowledge of the external world, but whatever.) Second edit: in fact, you can't even get intersubjectivity from your position, since your don't think you know other people exist. You're advocating solipsism. Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 18:09 on May 20, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 20, 2016 18:05
|
|
|
Zaradis posted:I would not call holding to the logical conclusions of subjective experience "radical", since it is a logical necessity. 'Radical' in the sense of "All knowledge is illusory, pull it up by the root!" Anyway, logical inference goes two ways and your modus ponens is my modus tollens. I tend to think that if out turns out that some philosophical position leads to the conclusion that nobody knows anything, that counts as a reductio against that position. The a priori insistence that nothing can be known is a surefire way to shut down a conversation. Like, I could reply to any post in D&D (or SAL even) saying "You don't know that! Nobody knows anything!" And it would be about as interesting and relevant as it is here. But, you know, Duhem-Quine and 'come what may' and all that. The most I can do is show that your premises lead to something ridiculous, but if you are determined to accept that conclusion anyway, there's not really anything I can do. Oh well. (Though I suspect you will not have the courage of your convictions, and will, at some point, claim to have knowledge of something). Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 18:28 on May 20, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 20, 2016 18:22
|
|
|
Zaradis posted:I never claimed that nobody can know anything and I've already claimed that I know things. I don't doubt that other people know things too. We all have a great deal of subjective experiential knowledge. That is the only type of knowledge that we can have. And when many subjectivities agree on what counts as experiential knowledge we call it objective knowledge. Wow, I'm having a hard time figuring out what it is you're saying. Let me know if I'm still missing the mark: First Guess posted:We can know facts, even facts about objects, but those facts aren't objective, since we can't be certain about them. Is that a fair rendering of your position? Because if it is, it looks very much like you're mistaking certainty for objectivity. Alternatively: Second Guess posted:We can know facts, but not facts about objects, only facts about our conscious experience. So we have knowledge, but not objective knowledge. This doesn't involve a terminological confusion, but it does entail solipsism. Because on this account what you know is something like "I am presently having an experience as of someone talking to me," but you absolutely do not know anything like "Someone is presently talking to me" or even "That, over there, is a person." You might think that we infer the latter from the former, but that we lose certainty along the way. So we know that 'This is a person' but we aren't certain about it. But this is the same conclusion we got from the first guess: we have fallibile objective knowledge. To deny that this is really objective knowledge is, once again, simply to confuse certainty and objectivity. So it looks like your position either depends on a terminological confusion, or else it entails solipsism. Finally this is all ignoring the fact that whichever of these positions you're prepared to endorse, the problem you're pointing out isn't unique to moral facts; it generalizes to all knowledge. If the most you can say about knowledge of moral facts is that I can be no more certain of it than I am that I have two hands, then that looks like a pretty weak argument against moral realism.
|
|
#
¿
May 20, 2016 18:54
|
|
|
Zaradis posted:Before I address your questions, do we agree that solipsism is the necessary logical result of subjective experience? If not, then we're both wasting our breath because that logical conclusion is the basis of all I've been talking about so far. No, I think we can have knowledge of objects outside ourselves. Even though my mental representations only exist in my head, they nonetheless refer (in a Kripkean sense) to the things that cause them. This is the majority position among epistemologists; you are the one with a strange, revisionist epistemology. That I still don't fully understand. You've leaned pretty hard on this insistence that solipsism is the logical conclusion of your position in a few posts now, with the implication that there are other sorts of conclusions that are not logical but are still somehow important to consider. I'm not sure what those are, or, frankly, how you intend for me to interpret 'logical' here. Zaradis posted:For now I will assume we agree so as to answer your questions. Your second guess is correct. But this is not "fallible objective knowledge," it is subjective knowledge. As the guess implies, if objective knowledge exists or is possible it is not so for human beings. It certainly entails solipsism. Subjective knowledge is the only type of knowledge human beings can possibly hold, by the very nature of human experience. No, this is an incoherent position based on a misunderstanding of the relevant terms. Either I have knowledge of objects outside my body or I don't. If I do, then I have objective knowledge; If I don't, then I don't. If this is not what you mean by 'objective,' then A.) you are misusing the term, and B.) you are misusing it in a way that you still haven't made clear. Zaradis posted:For a thing to be objectively real it must exist regardless of whether or not a subjectivity experiences it at a certain point in time. Objective reality is true independent of our subjective observations. Yet, all we can know are our subjective observations. So we cannot know anything objectively, since objective reality is dependent upon being true without subjective experience of it and we cannot know anything without subjectively experiencing it. If you believe that human beings are capable of knowledge without subjectively experiencing it, I would love to hear the insane argument supporting this idea. You're confusing metaphysics and epistemology. I can infer, from my observations of a thing plus background theory, what the thing does when I'm not observing it. I am not forced (logically or otherwise) to conclude that when a puppet goes behind a curtain, it ceases to exist. Anyway, here's an insane argument: You wrote "we cannot know anything without subjectively experiencing it" and "human beings are [not] capable of knowledge without subjectively experiencing it." In both of these sentences, the referent of the pronoun is unclear. One possibility is that 'it' refers to 'knowledge.' But that would either be a category error or would miss the point of our conversation. More plausibly, what you have in mind is "a human being cannot have knowledge of a state of affairs without directly experiencing that state of affairs." But this is clearly false. Here are two examples of ways I can come to know something about the world without direct experience of the fact in question: 1.) Testimony: a trustworthy person can tell me the fact in question. 2.) Inference: I can use my knowledge of a different state of affairs, and some body of established theory, to infer a fact about a state of affairs I haven't myself experienced. Okay, I'm sorry for so many quotes, but I've just got one more because I think it's actually somewhat important: Zaradis posted:It seems to me that a logically sound or valid argument that shows that objective knowledge is not possible would be quite a strong point against moral realism. But we don't seem to agree with or understand each other on any other topic, so why change that dynamic now? Okay: You think we do not have a 'logical' reason to think that there is an external world, but you still think it's 'reasonable' to think that; presumably, because there are other sorts of reasons. I think this is confused (because reasons of all kinds are subject to the rules of logical inference) but more importantly, if you're willing to make this move and be a naive realist in the case of the external world, why aren't you willing to take the same position about moral facts? This is what I've been asking you - You think that external-world skepticism is a knock down argument against moral realism, but you do not think it is a knock down argument against the external world. That's strange! And you haven't given an account of how that's supposed to work! If 'strong intuition' is enough for you to toss out logical conclusions you don't like in one case, why not another? rudatron posted:Well, all historical narratives involved in philosophy are a little fast and loose with the truth. I guess that's my bias showing up, because that's how it's treated in Abrahamic faiths. Greek pagan religion had no problem showing Gods as callous and capricious entities, which I presume you can judge for yourself. In systems with an unquestionable good deity, you need to deploy moral realism at some point, just to save His skin. You absolutely do see it in religious debates In The Wild, as it were. I'm still not sure about this. If moral realism is false, then there is no problem of evil, right? Someone could say "how could God allow all these bad things from happening, instead of good things?" and the obvious reply is "nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so." I mean, I guess you need moral realism in order to say that God is perfectly good, but this is what sets up the problem of evil, not what solves it.
|
|
#
¿
May 21, 2016 15:17
|
|
|
Who What Now posted:Spoiler Alert: Craig's a bit of a moron. Well, he's certainly not an excellent philosopher, and his published work is super sloppy, conceptually speaking. I've joked with the other grads in my department that he shows that the quality of work required for tenure is significantly lower if you're willing to be a Christian apologist.
|
|
#
¿
May 21, 2016 16:07
|
|
|
Zaradis posted:Anyway, you're confusing a thing that exists independent of subjective experience of it with a thing that exists dependent on subjective experience of it. You're referring to a thing existing dependent on subjective experience of it, which means it would cease to exist if it weren't being subjectively experienced. I'm talking about a thing existing independently of subjective experience, meaning it would exist regardless of whether or not it were being experienced. This would be a thing which exists objectively. And, as I argued above and many times earlier in this thread, the very nature of our experience does not allow for knowledge of this objective thing. We cannot have experience that is not subjective, therefore we cannot know whether or not things exist independent of subjective experience. That does not mean it does not exist, it means whether it exists or not is not something that we are capable of knowing. 1.) If there is an external world, then there are persisting objects which are generally the causes of my mental representations. 2.) A given mental representation refers to whatever phenomenon generally causes it. 3.) I form beliefs on the basis of inferences performed on my representations. 4.) From 2 and 3, the semantic content of my beliefs is at least partially constituted by reference to whatever causes my mental representations. 5.) From 1 and 4 , if there is an external world, then the semantic content of my beliefs is at least partially constituted by reference to persisting objects. 6.) Let's ignore Gettier for now and gloss 'knowledge' as 'justified true belief.' If you think Gettier cases are relevant, let me know. 7.) From 5, if there is an external world, I have true beliefs about persisting objects. 8.) At least some of those beliefs are justified. 9.) From 6, 7, and 8, if there is an external world, I have knowledge about persisting objects. You might think step (8) is mistake, requiring me to provide a theory of justification. I'm not interested in giving one. It's not relevant though, because if a theory of justification is your sticking point (as it seems to be, given your insistence on proof), then it is clear that what you are talking about is not objectivity after all. All your arguments amount to is the assertion that I have objective beliefs, but not objective knowledge, because my beliefs lack absolute certainty. In fact, the vast majority of theories of justification require something less than certainty, and if any of those is true, (Edit: and, I should say, if there is an external world) then it is additionally true as a matter of fact that I have objective knowledge. If you take Putnam seriously, then I have objective knowledge even in an evil demon scenario, because in that case all my mental representations refer to actions of the evil demon, and then those constitute the referential ground of my beliefs. What you think humans lack is some kind of absolute certainty about their beliefs. But absolute certainty is not a condition of objectivity, nor has it ever been. Objectivity is a question of reference, not justification. Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 17:42 on May 21, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 21, 2016 16:47
|
|
|
First, you're still confusing metaphysics with epistemology. If my representations are caused by objects outside my body, then this is so independently of any demonstration of this fact. If the moon is made of cheese, then its composition does not depend on whether I can prove that to your satisfaction, or anyone else's. If Julius Caesar had porridge for breakfast on his 14th birthday, then the fact that there is no evidence for this does not make it false. If my representations refer to objects, then they would still refer to objects even if we were rabbits who could not do philosophy. To generalize: the truth or falsity of a proposition is independent of our ability to discover it. It would be very strange to think otherwise. Second, the causal-historical theory of reference is well known, and you should be familiar with it if you're name-dropping Moore and Davidson. It does not entail all my representatives are objective. For example, my belief that I am hungry is subjective because it depends on a representation about the subject of the representation. It does not entail that all representations are veridical: in the dancing pink elephants case, we can see that the cause of that representation is not of a kind with the antecedent causes of similar representations (of other elephants, for example, which are usually caused by the presence of elephants). Finally, and again, no modern epistemologist thinks that a belief must be in-principle unrevisable to count as knowledge. Contextualists don't think so, reliabilists don't think so, epistemic virtue theorists don't think so. That's just not how we think about justification anymore. On any reasonable account of justification, it is in-principle defeasible. I don't know of anyone who thinks it is impossible to have a justified false belief. Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 21:24 on May 21, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 21, 2016 20:53
|
|
|
Zaradis posted:
But see, here's the point. Whether a belief is objective is independent of whether it is justified, or whether we know that it is objective, or whether we know that it is justified. So, to return to the conclusion (call it 'C') of my numbered argument: C: If there is an external world, then we have at least some objective knowledge about it. You have not denied this. You have not directly engaged with this, my primary thesis. The only question you're raising is whether we know that there is an external world. Which does bear on the question of whether we know of our bits of knowledge that they are objective. But it has no bearing whatsoever on whether those bits of knowledge are in fact about things outside us, that is, whether they are objective. So I think C is clearly true, and that we can be confident that we know that C is true. The only further question is whether we know that the antecedent (call it 'A') of C is true. A: There is an external world I'll address this, but I want to stress: the outcome of an inquiry as to the truth of A has no bearing on the truth of the conditional C. The truth of C is independent of the truth of A. No argument for external-world skepticism can call into question the truth of C (unless that argument also contained e.g. a revisionist account of justification). Okay, that's out of the way, let's talk about skepticism. First, I have never come across an argument for external-world skepticism that actually denies the truth of A. If there is an evil demon deceiving me, and I am not the evil demon, then there is a world external to me which encompasses, at the very least, the evil demon. If I am a brain in a vat then there is a world external to me which encompasses, at the very least, a vat to put a brain in. Rather, what they propose is that the external world is radically different from what I would expect. So call this proposition A*: A*: There is an external world that does not resemble what we take it to be. I think Putnam addressed this in 1981: Since reference is fixed by causal history, then whatever phenomenon or collection of phenomena out there in the external world that are responsible for my mental representation 'hand' are, as a matter of fact, the referent of that representation. Which makes the utterance 'I have two hands' true even if I am a brain in a vat. Maybe you think this looks like a cop-out. Maybe you think your mental representations have content over and above their causal history, and that whatever electrical impulses cause a BIV to have an experience as of chair do not sufficiently resemble that extra representational content. I think you're wrong about mental content, but okay. So then what you're looking for is a reason to believe that we know A. Which means that you are asking for an epistemic justification for belief in A. We've established that you do not think that justification has to carry with it absolute certainty. So then what would justify a belief that there is an external world? Well, here's an obvious inference: if there's a city in France called Paris, then there is an external world. So what would we normally take as justifying reasons for a belief that there is a city in France called Paris? I suppose we'd look at a map, or ask a Frenchman, or even take a trip there ourselves. Then, satisfied in our new belief about the existence of Paris, we happily infer: 'if Paris exists, then something that isn't me exists. Paris exists, so something that isn't me exists. That's just what an external world is, so QED' or some such thing. Maybe you don't like this either. But why not? Maybe you think that a belief in an external world is a special sort of belief, which has a higher standard of justification than most other 'ordinary' beliefs. First, it's not obvious to me why this would be. It seems like establishing the existence of anything at all that isn't me is a much easier task than establishing the existence of any particular non-me thing. But I'll go along with this. What higher standard of justification does this belief have, as opposed to something like 'Obama is the president of the U.S.A.'? Here's the crux, because I think you want to say something like "what you would need to justify such a belief would be to compare the correspondence of your representations of the world with some further standard that is not a mental representation." There are two possible readings of this requirement. On one, this is just what we do every minute of every day. On another, it is a logical impossibility; just so much gibberish. It's impossible to even imagine what that would look like. First, you've already said that you don't think justification of a proposition should have to strictly entail the truth of that proposition. Secondly, even if you are now prepared to insist otherwise, this is tendentious. You might as well say: In order to justify your belief in the external world, you must prove that 2+2=5. If you set the justificatory standard to something that you yourself regard as involving a logical impossibility, then you may as well just define 'external world' as 'something that we can't know if it exists or not.' Here's a response you could give: "look, any choice of a standard of justification is basically arbitrary. If my choosing an impossible standard is tendentious, so is your choosing a standard that has obviously already been fulfilled." I think this is also mistaken. What I'm trying to do is take paradigmatic cases of knowledge, look to see what is similar about those beliefs and how they are arrived at, and use that to synthesize a theory of justification to apply to all such cases. If you're going to take particular propositions or beliefs and say that they have a special, higher standard of justification, you need to have some independently compelling reason why they should be exempted from the general account. Or maybe you think I'm not even justified in believing that Paris exists - that is, maybe you are prepared to apply the same impossibly high standard of justification for all beliefs (contrary, again, to your profession that you don't think justification entails certainty). And maybe it doesn't bother you that it turns out we don't, and indeed, could not in any possible world, know anything. Well, I guess all I can say is that this is an account of knowledge that just isn't very illuminating. If you still want to insist on using this terminology in a way that literally nobody else does, then let me propose the new words: 'schmawledge,' and 'schmustified.' And I'll use these concepts to distinguish between beliefs that we think were arrived at in a generally truth-sensitive way from those that were not. Then on this account we 'schmow' that there is an external world and we don't 'schmow,' for example, that unicorns exist or that Julius Caesar had porridge for breakfast on his 14th birthday. This just seems like a much more useful distinction than the one you are drawing. Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 02:10 on May 22, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 22, 2016 00:44
|
|
|
Ratoslov posted:It's remarkably convenient that the Creator's morality perfectly aligns with the OP's moral intuitions. If you're already committed to thinking that God created humans in His image, it's not really a stretch to think that God would have also provided us with a moral sense that tends toward the truth. The contrary would be strange: to think that God provided us with a set of moral intuitions designed to lead us astray.
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2016 14:15
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 16:07 |
|
|
Sharkie posted:Hi, this is a question I asked in another thread, but this one has lots of philosophy people in it so this may be a better place. Singer's Famine, Affluence and Morality isn't quite this but touches on some similar themes. Edit: wait, do you think that the world has serious moral crises that could be solved by a sudden surge in plumbers? Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 15:58 on May 22, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 22, 2016 15:50
|
|