Freethought & Rationalism Archive

John Page · 01-16-2003, 05:26 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Kantian
....[content free response]....

~Transcendentalist~

Once more, answer the question, Kanty, do you consider the word 'indescribable' meaningless (irrespective of whether you categorize it as the binary opposite of anything) or meaningful. If meaningful, to what does the word 'indescribable' refer and if meaningless how is it part of language?

Links to amazon.com and accusations of ignorance are not meaningful responses. Irrespective of the works of others, now is the time to justify your own assertions.

Cheers, John

John Page · 01-16-2003, 05:52 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Kantian
Does a detailed cognitive model of consciousness, specifically the �framework of the capacity of a subject to verbally report a mental state� provide an adequate explanation of phenomenological consciousness?

Does it also explain consciousness of the trascendental ideal?

Cheers, John

Darth Dane · 01-16-2003, 07:18 AM

According to the context everything is both true and a false/lie

We have shelf so to say, where all the questions and answers and statements and sentences are. Everything can be asked, right? some will seem like foolish or silly questions, but they are questions none the less.

Now, lets say I am in a room with someone else, where there is a table made of wood.

Now I can say, or pick out a sentence from the shelf, that goes like this: "This table is made of Gold."

This will be false or a lie.

However that same sentence will be true, if I am in a room with a table made of gold.

So this means that given the context you are in, everything can be true or false/a lie.

But this is true!!!

We now have two boxes.

1) all is true
2) all is untrue

These two are both true! depending on your point of view.

But maybe they should be put like this:

1) all can be true
2) all can be untrue.

So that is a higher form of Truth, so to say....or is it?

It is true that all can both be true and untrue, depending on your POV
It is false/a lie that all can not be true and untrue, depending on your POV.

"The truth is out there"

Someone once said that Truth, with a capital T, is the highest religion.

"and the Truth shall set you free"

What do you want to be true?

DD - Truthfull Spliff

Clutch · 01-16-2003, 07:34 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Kantian
That goes for me too. On what basis do I mouth off about books I haven�t read? On what basis do you take my judgments for, as well?

Well, that is of course a very good question.

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Scientism is much more radical than the mere application of the scientific method, whatever that is. Scientism is the mournful specter of the failed enterprise of logical positivism, which is the claim that the only meaningful claims are scientific. The problem is that this is not a scientific claim, and if it is true, it is not meaningful. Therefore, scientism is fundamentally either false or meaningless.

Hmm. You don't seem to be discussing anything interestingly related to scientism as I defined it. You seem moreover to be using a highly idiosyncratic definition of scientism yourself, on which it just is a positivistic theory of meaning. (Would it be scientistic to claim that all aesthetic claims that cannot be practically reduced to physics are meaningful but false? Not on your definition. I think even fans of the notion of scientism will wonder just where your definition popped out of.)

Now, in the spirit of pluralism, I pointed out that there is no clear a priori means of deciding where in intellectual inquiry scientific practices will not yield illumination -- nowhere did I claim that there is any domain in which only empirical methods yield illumination, since that would be as baseless as charges of scientism -- and that the last few centuries are replete with examples of the methods typically considered scientific shedding light on questions typically considered philosophical.

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Yes, but this is irrelevant to whether Daniel Dennett is a naturalist � which is a nice word for someone who practices �scientism.� The history of science, as anarchical it seems, has nothing to do with whether Dennett preached the virtues of scientism in his books.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean, here. Now naturalism = scientism = positivism? Oh, and = vulgar reductionism, too. In any event, of course my observations are entirely relevant, since they undermine the charge that bringing general scientific standards and methods to bear on the problem of consciousness amounts to something problematic, called scientism. I don't see that Dennett is doing anything but bringing general scientific standards and methods to bear on the problem of consciousness, and you certainly have not offered any analysis of the specifics of his proposals to suggest otherwise.

Quote:

Among other things, the possibility of non-euclidean mathematics is enough to doubt Kant�s synthetic a priori judgments, but not sufficient grounds to ignore the ramifications of his conceptual programme.

Yet again this has nothing to do with my point, which was simply that if Kant had been taken seriously on the geometry of space, it would have closed off a priori a vastly illuminating way of thinking about the universe, supplied eventually by abstract mathematics and empirical physics.

Quote:

Note to the lurkers: the word �empirical.�

Er... Yes, note it. I guess the significance of this eludes me, since I don't subscribe to the Argument By Pinning Terms Just Known To Be Real Bad Onto Positions. Shall we add "empirical" to the fold of scientism, positivism, naturalism, vulgar reductionism, and whatever others are to be attached without argument nor scholarship to a work you have not read?

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Indulge me, how the hell does the charge of scientism block the path of inquiry? If the adoption of a metaphysical worldview dictates certain results, then it stands to reason that an alternate conceptual scheme would produce different ones. If a person espouses that the only path of inquiry is science, isn�t he doing the very thing old Charles warned against?

If it is decided without argument that a method or class of methods is inappropriate in a given domain, this forecloses live options for such methods to produce insights. Groundless charges of {insert K's equivalence class of Real Bad Names here} seem, then, to have this potential.

Quote:

Does a detailed cognitive model of consciousness, specifically the �framework of the capacity of a subject to verbally report a mental state� provide an adequate explanation of phenomenological consciousness?

Maybe. Maybe not. More surprising things have developed in the history of intellectual inquiry. If you want to debate the specifics of Dennett's book, get back to me after you read it and we can talk.

Hugo Holbling · 01-19-2003, 09:30 AM

Here is an interesting link which includes a discussion of Church's so-called "Slingshot argument", which may be pertinent here. I quote the relevant passage below. According to Davidson, there is no way around it for the correspondence theory; of course, others disagree. I wonder if it would be otiose to discuss it here?

Quote:

Facts will only serve as the truth-making correlates of sentences or propositions if they can be individuated and identified in a principled way. However, there is an important argument�now often referred to as the 'slingshot' (Barwise & Perry 1981)�attributed by Alonzo Church (1956, p. 25) to Frege and subsequently espoused by such philosophers as Donald Davidson (1969, pp. 41-2) and W. V. Quine, the implication of which is that facts cannot be non-trivially individuated. The argument purports to show that if a 'fact' is what a true sentence or proposition 'corresponds' to, then all true sentences or propositions correspond to the same fact�so either we should avoid an ontology of facts, or else we have to accept that there is only one fact, the 'Great Fact'. The latter position, however, is of no use to a proponent of the correspondence theory of truth, since it entirely trivializes that theory. The argument (or one version of it) goes as follows. If facts exist, and a certain sentence, P, is true, then it is surely undeniable that

(1) The fact that P is identical with the fact that P.

However, it is surely also the case that the singular term 'the fact that P' should not change its reference if we substitute for P another sentence Q which is logically equivalent to P, nor if we substitute for any singular term in P another singular term with the same reference. This being so, let Q be any true sentence distinct from P and let a be any arbitrarily chosen object. Then it is easily provable that P is logically equivalent to the following sentence: '{a} = {x: x = a & P}'. (This may be read in English as follows: 'The set whose sole member is a is identical with the set every member x of which satisfies the condition that x is identical with a andP is the case'.) Hence, from (1) we can deduce

_

(2) The fact that P is identical with the fact that {a} = {x: x = a & P}.

However, in exactly the same way it can be proved that Q is logically equivalent to '{a} = {x: x = a & Q}'. It follows that the two singular terms '{x: x = a & P}' and '{x: x = a & Q}' have the same reference, since both have the same reference as the singular term '{a}'. Accordingly, we can substitute the second of these terms for the first in (2) to give

(3) The fact that P is identical with the fact that {a} = {x: x = a & Q}.

Finally, using the already established logical equivalence between Q and '{a} = {x: x = a & Q}', we can deduce from (3)

(4) The fact that P is identical with the fact that Q.

Thus, starting out from some highly plausible assumptions and an apparently trivial premise, (1), we have been able to deduce that any two true sentences, P and Q, correspond to the same fact, if indeed facts exist. There are various ways in which one might attempt to block this argument�for instance, by rejecting the assumption that so-called set-abstracts like '{x: x = a & P}' are genuinely singular referring terms, or by allowing that the substitution of one singular referring term for another co-referring one within P may alter the reference of the term 'the fact that P'. But none of these strategies is particularly compelling.

Frege's own conclusion from this line of reasoning (to the extent that Church is correct in attributing it to him) was that, rather than saying that every true sentence corresponds to a fact which makes it true, we should say that every true sentence has as its reference the True (and that every false one has as its reference the False). (See Frege 1892b, p. 63.) That is to say, the reference of every (assertoric) sentence is a truth value, of which there are just two. (The only exceptions to this rule, for Frege, would be assertoric sentences containing names lacking a reference, such as 'Zeus': such a sentence, he thought, must itself lack a reference and hence have no truth value.) Frege did not believe that one could define 'truth', holding it to be a primitive and irreducible notion. Of course, the idea that a sentence can have a 'reference' may seem odd, though only if we take names as our paradigms of expressions having a reference (this, then, is a case in which the term 'semantic value' may be less misleading than the term 'reference'). It should be pointed out here that between Frege's extreme of taking all true sentences to have the same reference and the opposite extreme of taking all logically non-equivalent true sentences to 'correspond' to different 'facts' there are many intermediate positions. Consider, thus, the case of negative and disjunctive true sentences of the forms 'Not P' and 'P or Q', respectively. A correspondence theorist need not say that 'Not P' is made true by a negative fact, the fact that not P, nor that 'P or Q' is made true by a disjunctive fact, the fact that P or Q. He can say that 'Not P' is true because there is no fact that P for it to correspond to, and he can say that 'P or Q' is either made true by the fact that P or else made true by the fact that Q. Thus, on this view, logically non-equivalent true sentences can, but need not, have the same 'truth-makers'.

John Page · 01-19-2003, 07:06 PM

Quote:

Originally quoted by Hugo Holbling
Thus, starting out from some highly plausible assumptions and an apparently trivial premise, (1), we have been able to deduce that any two true sentences, P and Q, correspond to the same fact, if indeed facts exist.

1. If facts don't exist (i.e. are imaginary) they could still purport to refer to the same state of affairs.
2. If, on the other hand, the facts concerned are unimaginable (by you or me) then we have no idea what we're talking about.
3. Two different sentences can refer to or describe the same state of affairs and be considered true statements (i.e. facts). However, this does not make the two sentences 'correspond to the same fact'. More below.

Quote:

Originally quoted by Hugo Holbling
Frege's own conclusion from this line of reasoning (to the extent that Church is correct in attributing it to him) was that, rather than saying that every true sentence corresponds to a fact which makes it true, we should say that every true sentence has as its reference the True (and that every false one has as its reference the False). (See Frege 1892b, p. 63.)....Frege did not believe that one could define 'truth', holding it to be a primitive and irreducible notion.

The issue here is "the True". Let me assert that facts do not reside in books and truth does not reside in sentences. That something is true or factual is a judgement applied by the preceiver. Now if two perceivers agree upon a fact then it is so in both their minds, and might also occur in other perceiver's minds that have a common frame of reference and mechanism for determining facts/truth.

As to the last excerpt above, if the author that you quoted has correctly represented Frege's views then I disagree with those views. Truth is a function of the mind's processes and the degree of truth can be assessed by testing the degree of correspondence (with one's experience). It is therefore true that truth is subjective - you are at liberty to disagree, of course, thereby proving my point.

Cheers, John

John Page · 01-19-2003, 07:08 PM

01-19-2003, 07:08 PM	#227
John Page Veteran Member Join Date: May 2001 Location: US Posts: 5,495	oops

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01-16-2003, 07:18 AM	#223
Darth Dane Veteran Member Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Required Posts: 2,349	According to the context everything is both true and a false/lie We have shelf so to say, where all the questions and answers and statements and sentences are. Everything can be asked, right? some will seem like foolish or silly questions, but they are questions none the less. Now, lets say I am in a room with someone else, where there is a table made of wood. Now I can say, or pick out a sentence from the shelf, that goes like this: "This table is made of Gold." This will be false or a lie. However that same sentence will be true, if I am in a room with a table made of gold. So this means that given the context you are in, everything can be true or false/a lie. But this is true!!! We now have two boxes. 1) all is true 2) all is untrue These two are both true! depending on your point of view. But maybe they should be put like this: 1) all can be true 2) all can be untrue. So that is a higher form of Truth, so to say....or is it? It is true that all can both be true and untrue, depending on your POV It is false/a lie that all can not be true and untrue, depending on your POV. "The truth is out there" Someone once said that Truth, with a capital T, is the highest religion. "and the Truth shall set you free" What do you want to be true? DD - Truthfull Spliff

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