Clutch

Normal, I see now that you have been making a very simple mistake.

"Predictive" does not mean "predictable". (Champion of the dictionary definition, you might have looked it up...)

I have not been saying that one of the utilities of truth is that it's predictable. The truth is often not predictable at all!

I've been saying that it's predictive. A typical advantage of knowing truths over falsehoods is that you can better predict what will happen next. Hence the connection with testability -- competing distinct predictions can be tested. Hence the plausibility of taking Sagan to have prediction in mind as one of the hallmarks of "veridical worth".

Before popping off about someone's carefully explained idea, Normal, you should make sure you understand all the words they use.

PS -- "I think therefore I am" is universally abbreviated as the Cogito argument. (From Cogito ergo sum, the Latin version of the inference.) Given your expertise I assumed you would know this. My apologies.

Normal

I'm the one not reading the posts?

Statement: "God Exists"

Disambiguation: "Some people think God exists"

Does this prove god exists or not?

Whether people value human life or not is irrelevant to human life actually having value.

It's a simple parallel.

Normal

Could you then explain how the cognito ergo sum argument has absolutely no predictive power? I seem to remember Descartes coming to the conclusion that it was one of the only truths he knew for sure, and all other truths are derived from it. Does that not exemplify predictive power, in your sense of the word?

Clutch

Try it with "fun" too, and see what sort of parallel you get. Value, I suggest is more like fun than it is like existence.

Anyhow, the only relevant thing you say here isNow, that's an assertion that you've made before, with no more argument than you give here. And, yes, you are not reading the posts, since I dealt with this above. In explicit, easy-to-understand English. I went like this:Now, maybe my argument here is flawed somehow. If you can get beyond embarrassing yourself with attempts to score points, perhaps you'll actually offer a competing explanation, or rationally critique my own view.

Or you could sit back and see what bd offers by way of disagreement with me when he returns, since it will be carefully considered and worth taking seriously.

By the way, your God example is at least a parallel to the value case in this respect: it's one of the more famous examples of a claim that, without a great deal of clarification, is too ill-defined to evaluate. Unfortunately for you, this parallel only reconfirms my point.

Clutch

Well, you might say "please", since you're asking a favour. But sure. "It" being the cogito, right? (Note spelling.) Which is embedded in what you're calling Descartes' conclusion. So, agreed. As I've said, the meta-level claim offers the prediction that every instance of "I think" will be true at the time tokened. In this respect it is different from the cogito itself.Well, that's the part he was rather notoriously wrong about.

Normal

All you are doing here is switching the weight from the objective case, to the subjective case. If you do the same thing with god, you can prove god exists by switching it from "god exists" to "people think god exists". All you need to know about "Human life is valuable" is the definition of each word. If you have a problem with "valuable", I guess you can change the assertion to "Human life is worth protecting".

Normal

I think you've been reading too much Hume for your own good.

All truths we know come from our sensory preceptions, and what is the origin of our sensory preceptions? Our existence.

Clutch

Look, I don't want to keep doing this to you in public, but you should stop trying to give smug opinions about stuff you don't actually know much about. The smugness isn't the problem in itself; it's the not knowing what you're talking about that makes me want to leave you to your own devices here.

This has nothing whatever to do with Hume. Sheesh.

Our existence is not "the origin" of sensations in any useful sense -- more like an enabling condition.

And that's utterly, spectacularly, irrelevant in any case.

We're talking about the derivability of all other truths from the Cogito. Of course if I didn't exist, I could not believe that Brutus stabbed Julius Caesar -- but "Brutus stabbed Caesar" is not derivable from "I exist".

For frick's sakes, the whole point of the Meditations is that Descartes tries to get from the Cogito to "A benevolent God exists and created me". He figures that if he can get that far, the rest will fall out of God's benevolence. The notorious failure is in that first step: it's riddled with fallacies.

Now, if you want a primer on Descartes you should take your own advice and actually read him, and then read The Cambridge Companion or some other scholarly introduction. If you want to talk about the existence of gods and the defensibility of Sagan's criterion, you'll have to produce arguments.

But please, don't waste time with pointless allusions to irrelevancies.

Clutch

Of course the problem here is the word "valuable". And explaining its moral meaning is sort of the point of great swathes of philosophy. Owning a dictionary is not a solution here.

I explained to you one reasonable definition of "valuable", and argued for it by example.

Clearly "Gold is valuable" is testable. As is "Methane is valuable", "Salt is valuable" and "Flies are valuable".

So why not "Human life is valuable"? You have only asserted the contrary. The same reasoning applies to "worth". You need an argument showing some well-defined notion "X is worth Y" above and beyond the agent-indexed "X is worth Y to Z". The latter is uncontroversial, and its instances are testable. The former is undefined, so far.

Normal

That is clearly not what I was trying to say. I was saying the only way we can know anything is by existence. It is the first condition before all other truths.

That was the direction Descartes took his meditations, but you clearly missed the point on why he abandoned his senses in the first place.

Your arguments seem to revolve around straw men, so I'm not sure I'm the one that needs a primer.