In a recent comment, William J. Murray wrote:
Slightly off topic, but relevant
Well, let’s discuss that (all of that comment) here in a new topic where it won’t be off topic.
WJM began that comment with:
There is no way to talk about “things” unless things exist for us to talk about, and unless words mean something in context and not something else. Unless we mean to say something, and not something else. Unless concepts describe something, and not something else.
As a mathematician, I talk about the square root of minus 1. When mathematicians first talked about that, it was assumed to not exist. But now most mathematicians would say that it does exist, perhaps in some Platonic sense. It is actually important to electronics, the technology that we are using when we post on the Internet.
Over 400 years ago, people talked about phlogiston. It was considered important, and was the basis for some serious scientific research by J.B. Priestley. These days, we say that phlogiston does not exist and never existed. We come to this conclusion, partly as a result of the research of Priestley, though he himself continued to defend the idea of phlogiston.
At one time, people seriously talked of the luminiferous æther. It was considered real enough for Michelson and Morley to devise a now famous experiment to measure the æther drift. Today, we say that the æther does not exist and never existed.
These examples clearly suggest a problem with what WJM says are the requirements for talk.
Let me include the remainder of WJM’s comment:
Slightly off topic, but relevant: There is a common denominator I’ve noticed in several threads from several posters that is very interesting and, IMO, important. When talking about intelligence, concepts of reality, logic, etc., many posters here take the tack that such things are subjective to human perspective (anthropocentric concepts) that may or may not apply to other “intelligent” beings, or to other perspectives of reality. Logic, it is apparently being argued, is really nothing more than a subjective map humans anthropomorphically apply to their experiences, which may or may not be a “true” description of reality (even though for there to be a “true” description of “reality”, reality would have to be an identifiable thing, requiring the LOI to be valid in terms of its relationship to “reality”.)
So, I’m going to coin a term: hyperskeptical anti-anthropocentrism, or being skeptical of the human perspective to the point of embracing irrationality, or HAA for short.
HAA would be the natural extension of atheistic materialism and the heir to the Copernican Principle, where Earth, and by extension humans, are “nothing special”. Our grip on reality would be nothing more than an evolutionary trait, like scales or hair, neither “true” or “not true”, just an aid to our survival differential. In that sense, a false belief is better than a true belief if a false belief aid more in our survival differential. Logic, epistemology, ontology, sound premises – nothing more than species-centric adaptations produced by mindless interactions of molecules. We can no more know “truth” than an amoeba or a cactus; what we consider to be “true” is just a result of interacting molecules.
Rationality, technically, is based on logic. Logic is fundamentally rooted in axioms accepted as necessary; once one dismisses the necessary validity of those axioms, they have necessarily given up rationality. They can re-define what it is to be reasonable or rational (perhaps by appealing to consensus), but when it comes to logic, they have abandoned reason.
And so we have these claims about how we cannot expect alien intelligence to be like human intelligence when producing a symbology that corresponds to the universe, because they might “see” and consider an entirely different universe than humans do. Their logic might not be the same. They might have 4-sided triangles, and relational distances between objects represented in symbols might be something entirely different than scale of some sort. Two moons orbiting a planet might be symbolically represented as 5 objects around a centered object. Or other intelligences might not identify one thing from another at all. I’m sure that all of life could exist just fine being unable to discern dinner from rocks from the moon, or predator from prey from indigestion.
You either believe that humans are capable of deliberately discerning true statements about the world, or you do not. If you do not, I suggest your presence in a debate forum cannot be construed as intrinsically anything more than a monkey flinging feces around. If you consider logic nothing more than an evolutionary feature that helps in our differential survival, then you necessarily consider flinging feces, killing off the young of our competitors, and consuming one’s mate after copulation equally sound “arguments” to make.
Making an argument that logic is not necessary, or is just an anthropocentric feature that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with reality, or that some things don’t have to be logically reconciled or supported, is itself an argument defeated by the content of your argument.
So, you can fling some feces (words) around. So what? So can everyone else. How about this view: I’m right, because I say so. If we are going to abandon logical principles where it suits us, that is as good an argument as any.
I will say more about that in comments to this thread. I wanted to keep contentious issues out of the main post.
I never was quite sure what “metaphysics” refers to, but I’m pretty sure that WJM is making some strong metaphysical claims there. Hence the title of this thread.
[A note to the site owner: I put this in Philosophy of Science and Theism/Atheism categories. They are the closest that I could find, but neither is at all close. I don’t seem to have the privileges needed to create new categories. Please feel free to fix the categories for this post.]
Axioms support systems of logic, including some useful systems. Plane geometry is useful.
Less useful when the surface is a sphere. Etc.
It is an error to assume that the language symbolic logic can universally be applied to the world of things and processes. I find it odd that Platonists would assume that things of the world can be the subject of axiomatic propositions.
The more charitable interpretation of Murray’s claim, insofar as I understand it, would be to say that reality must have describable features, and that our thought and talk,when we think and talk truly, describes those describable features. (The correspondence theory of truth)
That’s different from saying that everything that we take to be true at a given stage of inquiry must also be held true, regardless of where inquiry takes us. But, as Neil’s examples indicate, that’s pretty silly, and besides which, no serious defender of the correspondence theory of truth is committed to it.
I take Murray’s argument to be, in short:
(1) the correspondence theory of truth is incompatible with a naturalistic* explanation of mindedness;
(2) the correspondence theory of truth is the only account we have of the concept of truth;
(3) so, if we accept a naturalistic theory of cognition, we must reject the correspondence theory of truth;
(4) so, we would have no way of distinguishing between truth and falsity
Presumably, similar arguments could be made to conclude that a naturalistic theory of cognition undermines the distinction between sense and nonsense, or between right and wrong.
The general argument would be that naturalism is incompatible with normativity (epistemic normativity [truth], semantic normativity [meaning], and ethical normativity [rightness]).
* = taking “naturalistic” here to be metaphysical naturalism — the denial that there’s anything outside of the natural order. More specifically, no disembodied minds, souls, gods, or other spiritual beings, and so nothing to direct or guide biological evolution.
Untrue, and is exactly the kind of misconception about the LOI that I referred to in an earlier post in that thread. Concepts are things, even if they aren’t known to exist in any other format but a concept. “Enjoyment” is a thing. “Happiness” is a thing. “Hope” is a thing. Hope is not despair. Enjoyment is not misery. Happiness is not sadness.
As I pointed out in that other thread in a prior post: the fact that some conflate a “thing” with “a classically configured material object” is not a failing of the LOI; it only shows that one is being sloppy or are limited in their capacity to describe the thing in question.
Even if we just conceptualize a thing that might exist, we can only think about it, describe it, offer it for argument if it is identifiable from other things.
That seems to be exactly what is undermined by quantum theory (and by any sufficiently complete physical description). Correspondence seems to me to be impossible if one probes deeply enough into any phenomenon. I invoke the principle that science is increasingly less wrong.
Plainly put, I do not think reality must have describable features. It’s indescribable all the way down. But we get through life by accepting approximations that never deviate from expectations, such as the expectation that the moon exists.
Except for its indescribable-ness, apparently.
Except that you’ve provided no way for “what science says” – even about quantum theory – to correspond truthfully to reality, and therefore be “less wrong”, because, as you content, “it is indescribable all the way down.”
Which makes all descriptions of reality equal, since reality is not describable. No description can be more or less wrong, because truth doesn’t correspond to reality – under your argument.
Arguments that refute one’s own points are irrational.
WJM:
Strictly speaking, words do not have meanings. People have meanings and use words to convey those meanings. That is to say, the meaning inheres in the person, not in the word. And there can be differences, often subtle differences, between what two people mean when they use the same word.
This post of mine, in the other thread, is important for a full understanding. I was responding to this question:
However, the law of identity itself only applies to something that can be defined as an object.
I responded:
The LOI applies to everything – if it didn’t, we could not imagine it, think about it, talk about it, or argue it.
WJM:
That they are subjective seems obvious enough. Most of us do assume that there is an objective reality, and that our subjective reality is somehow connected with that, even if imperfectly.
I haven’t the faintest idea what that is trying to say. Can somebody explain it, or translate it into ordinary language?
I see logic as abstract, as not connected to anything in reality. We make temporary connections between our logic and reality when we use logic in reference to reality.
I’m not sure what that “hyperskeptical” is supposed to be about. I don’t consider myself hyperskeptical. I think I am only skeptical in an ordinary and very sensible way. When I receive an email about millions of dollars about to come to me from Nigeria, I am ordinarily skeptical. I tend toward being what is usually called a naive realist, with respect to the world.
I think WJM is ascribing hyperskepticism where there is none.
WJM:
That seems to be a polemic. It uses strong rhetoric, but it isn’t clear that it has any actual content.
Let’s look at this part: “the heir to the Copernican Principle, where Earth, and by extension humans, are “nothing special.” What is that even saying?
Of course, humans are nothing special to ants. We are just some of the critters that can trample them underfoot. The “nothing special” by itself means nothing. Most people do take us as being special to other people.
Granted, my knowledge of quantum mechanics is pretty rudimentary, but it seems wrong-headed to say that quantum phenomena aren’t describable. We can describe them perfectly well — we’ve got the equations! — it’s just that the criteria for describing quantum phenomena are slightly different from the criteria for classical mechanics. The uncertainty principle, as I understand it, describes perfectly well the inverse relation between accuracy of measurement of position and accuracy of measurement of momentum, and that the two properties cannot be measured with perfect accuracy simultaneously. That’s a description if I ever saw one!
In any event, the correspondence theory of truth needn’t commit us to saying that we do now, or will ever in fact, arrive at the single correct description of reality. All it need commit us to is to saying that our best theories aim at how things really are, and are true insofar as they succeed. I myself am happily committed to “increasingly less wrong”, so we’re on the same side of that issue. I like to call this the “asymptotic approximation to reality” picture. (Among philosophers of science, it’s called “convergent realism”.)
Thing is, I think Murray’s right: convergent realism isn’t a rejection of the correspondence theory of truth, but rather, convergent realism presupposes the correspondence theory of truth. Without correspondence, there’s no basis for judging the “increasingly” here.
To lay a few of my cards on the table: I think that the correspondence theory of truth (suitably interpreted) and a naturalistic theory of mindedness (where both “naturalistic” and “mindedness” are suitably interpreted) are compatible.
Best,
Carl
William J. Murray,
I think everyone is in agreement about the deductions that can be made from formal axiomatic systems.
The question in science is whether reality corresponds to a simple formal axiomatic system, and I suspect the answer is no. Reality is fuzzy all the way down.
What are your “suitable interpretation” of “naturalistic” and “mindedness”?
WJM:
That’s one of the meanings for “rationality”. Another is that rationality is the use of reasoning. The WJM comment to which I am responding is chock full of reasoning but has very little actual logic. Yet another meaning sometimes given to “rationality” is that it refers to the kind of behavior practiced by scientists.
I will disagree with that, too. I see logic as rooted in human practices, and amounts to an idealization of some of our reasoning practices.
William J Murray,
All descriptions of reality are not equal and a good example is the value of pi.
For centuries, the value of pi has been getting “less wrong” which means these descriptions are not equal.
Just because I can’t tell you the exact shade of red an apple is, doesn’t mean it’s equally valid to call it green.
I understand Murray to be drawing a contrast between two pictures of the relation between thought and reality. (I’m using “thought” here where he uses “logic”).
On one picture — the picture he’s rejecting — the categories of thought are imposed on reality, they are our imposition, so that we cannot answer the question as to whether or not reality has the structure of our categories. But, since truth is correspondence to reality, the imposition-picture means that there isn’t any truth. At best there’s a sort of pseudo-truth, a truth-for-us, insofar as we’ve using these categories.
The converse picture — the one that Murray recommends — holds that reality has a structure that corresponds to our categories, and when we think truly, we’re getting at that structure. And he thinks that having the second picture, the one that he recommends, is necessary for any sort of rationality at all. So if we reject that picture, we’re exiling ourselves from the community of rational inquirers.
I don’t know if that’s all that Murray’s getting at, but it’s the best I can do.
Carl
There was nothing untrue about what you quoted. I very carefully used the word “suggest” rather than “demonstrate.” I was well aware that what I saw as suggested might not have been what was intended.
I thank you for clarifying what you had intended.
You want me to post my entire metaphysical system in a blog post? Ha! No pressure! (I could tell you who I’ve been reading lately and responding to, but the names probably wouldn’t mean much.)
So I’d just say, for now, that by “naturalism” I mean non-reductive metaphysical naturalism: the denial of the existence of causally efficacious non-spatiotemporal entities, conjointly with the emergence of different levels of organization and complexity. And by “mindedness” I mean consciousness, intentionality, and — in the human case — rationality and normativity.
See, here’s the thing: I don’t think there’s anything absurd or silly about the idea that rational animals came into being through evolutionary processes, i.e. that Reason emerged from Nature. In fact, I think that’s almost certainly true. I understand that as a vindication of the reality of reason, not a denial of it, because I’m not committed to reductionism. Rationality will not, on my system, amount to everything that Plato or Aquinas or even Kant wanted it to be, but it isn’t nothing, either.
Best,
Carl
There’s no way to argue otherwise without inherently contradicting oneself.
Even arguing that there is no formal correlation between logic and reality is to necessarily implicate that very formal correlation by asserting that we are merely imposing our thought-structure on reality. What we are, what reality is, and how our thoughts correspond to or impose upon reality is part of reality, so by claiming we are only imposing our logic on reality we are asserting a true correlation; that this state of reality (us and what we are doing) is imposing logic on some other aspect of reality, and that those terms reflect the truth of what is going on.
The claim of “imposition” of logic upon reality could not be claimed if in fact there was no reference to correspondence, because the concept of “imposing thought upon reality” would have to correspond to what was actually going on.
Rationality works just fine as long as you understand that things are not ideas, and the reality we perceive does not perfectly correspond to the ideal.
It’s why we spend so much time trying to define terms. It’s also why we spend so much time talking past each other.
Look at you! Saying “as long as we understand that things are not ideas” as if “we” can share some kind of true, correlational understanding about what “things” and “ideas” are, and are not, as if the LOI was applicable and as if one can truthfully correlate logic & thought to reality! And this coming from someone who just got finished saying:
Unless you are contending that:
Is a true correlation to reality, then all you are doing is the equivalent of flinging feces.
It *****is***** why? (Implication of correspondence to reality). You should probably stick to more equivocal terms, like “it seems to me” and “it may be” and “it suggests”, so your arguments don’t get mistaken for truth-claims about reality.
That’s my position. Or, more correctly, the first part of that is my position. The supposed implications in the rest of that statement, I see as mistaken.
Of course, reality has the structure of our categories. It gets that structure from us. So the implications suggested for truth are just wrong.
If reality has a structure that is independent of us, then there is no way of us knowing that structure. We would all be in the position of robots – mindless mechanical systems with no ability to discern truth independently of what was innately encoded into our mechanisms
William J Murray,
How do you identify whether two stars are beside each other?
You might “see” them as being beside each other but in reality, one may be behind the other.
You can no longer ask why one “is” beside the other since you can’t be sure it “is” thanks to gravitational lensing.
We can only make a maybe statement about reality, never “is” unless you are the designer of reality.
Neil,
One of the major ways in which C.I. Lewis and W. Sellars improve on Kant, I think, is by making the categories dynamic and fluid, so that while on the one hand the categorical structures are, in some sense, “ours,” that “ours” gets qualified in two respects: (1) the categories are revised in light of experience (Lewis, Sellars); (2) that we have such categories at all can be explained in evolutionary terms (Sellars). I think that removes (part of?) the threat that Murray raises, of the imposition of categories on reality being arbitrary, ungrounded, etc. (the “cookie-cutter” picture).
Carl
Toronto said:
Then you best get to equivocating and qualifying these kind of assertions! “We can only…” should be replaced with “It seems to me that, for the most part, we…”; you should also probably strike the word “never” from your lexicon.
As it is, the structure of your statement contradicts the content. Not that it matters to you, since logic is only a map, and not the terrain.
Carl Sachs,
Thanks. Yes, that does sound about right.
That word “arbitrary” can be misleading. The categories are arbitrary, in the sense that they are not forced by reality (mathematicians we describe that as saying that the categorization is not canonical). But they are not arbitrary in the sense of being totally random.
We divide the world into categories because that is a useful thing to do. So we are guided by pragmatic concerns. And, as knowledge improves and our ideas on what is useful change, we revise that categorizations to suit.
So, it all comes down to the realist critiques of idealism (Murray) vs. the idealist critiques of realism (Rickert). And here I have this nice little pragmatist via media with no one to share it with. Poor me!
So here’s a question: how can any argument that makes the case that truths about reality are unknowable be anything other than sophistry and rhetoric? You can’t live, think, or argue as if truths about reality are unknowable. You can’t even argue that it is true that truths about reality cannot be known. You cannot even argue that they most likely cannot be known without asserting a truth about reality.
The same is true of LOI arguments; you cannot even express an argument about something without applying the LOI to what you are making a case about, otherwise nobody has any idea what you’re talking about – or even, for that matter, what you’re trying to say, if the LOI isn’t applied to words and concepts.
What’s the point in arguing with people who aren’t even making truth claims? Are we flinging feces at each other or appealing to emotion or some other manipulative fallacy? Are we just barking to hear ourselves bark? Arguments are either attempts to discern true statements from false, or they are nothing more than either elegant dances or barroom brawls.
Notice the non-equivocal language which implies the claims correspond to reality. As I said, one cannot argue against corresponence without invoking correspondence.
For some reason I can’t get my comment above to delete — the request for deletion isn’t being accepted.
I don’t think that thinking of the categories as “arbitrary” is helpful in articulating the pragmatist position. I prefer one of Sellars’ metaphors: that what we’re denying is that reality has a categorical structure of its own that impresses itself on the mind like a seal on melted wax. And also, in his evolutionary twist on Kant, he would say that the categories are contingent features of, among other things, natural history. So there’s a sort of necessity, a pragmatic a priori, with respect to how employ the categories we have, but there’s no necessity to having those categories.
Carl
William J Murray,
Why should any of us in the “subjective” camp “explicitly” claim “subjectivity” for every term we use?
That is our default position.
You are the one claiming absolutes, not us.
Everything I say is also subjective by default, even if I claim objectivity, since “I” am the one saying it.
Everything “you” say is subjective, even if you claim objectivity, because “you” are the one saying it.
There is no need for you to add, “I believe” to “it is”, since I believe it is you who actually believes it.
I think you are dichotomising a continuum. I would maintain that reality is unknowable – we do not have direct access to reality. However, we have models of reality and we can check those models against data. The better our models fit our data, the closer we know they are to reality.
So we approach reality assymptotically, as it were. I think this is an important point, and it’s the defense science has against the charge of “post-modernism” – it’s not that “anything goes” in science because it’s “all just models”. It’s that although all we have are models we have rigorous methods for evaluating those models, and of comparing one with another.
This is the point, as I see it, of Asimov’s excellent essay, The Relativity of Wrong. Notably, he did not entitle it The Subjectivity of Wrong.
William J Murray,
But we’re not asserting “truths”, we’re asserting beliefs in our statements regardless of what symbolic label I attach to that belief, i.e., whether it’s the word “true”, “exist” or “is”.
Regardless of how passionate your belief in an assertion may be, it is still your subjective opinion, nothing more.
I’d like to venture the suggestion that “absolute or subjective?” is a false dichotomy, or at least, threatens to become one.
Is it the case that one cannot argue against correspondence without appealing to correspondence? Well, maybe. But here’s the standard argument against that claim.
How would we know when correspondence has been achieved and when it hasn’t been? Ordinarily, we do things like, say, “That’s a cat!” while pointing at a cat in our vicinity. But the cat-perception is, of course, mediated by our visual system. If there’s another person around, and one is not just muttering to oneself “That’s a cat!”, the other person will assent, because the other person’s visual system is processing relevantly similar data. But of course neither of us can, to use the popular metaphor, “step outside of ourselves” and see the correspondence between our assertions and the cat-in-itself. (This is why, in the standard version of the correspondence theory, God is invoked as a transcendent guarantor of correspondence between mind and world.)
So, if we cannot step outside of ourselves and bear witness to the correspondence, then what can we do? We can, and do, say that “That’s a cat!” is true. But true by virtue of what? What makes the claim true? The truth-maker, whatever it is, is unavailable to us. A correspondence relation, when we only have access to one of the relata — namely, our perceptions and utterances about those perceptions — is hardly a relation worth having.
So maybe that’s part of the puzzle. When we talk about a correspondence relation, what are the relata? And to which relatum do we have access? If the relata are thoughts on the one hand, and perceptions on the other hand, that’s one thing. If the relatum “on our end,” so to speak, is thoughts+perceptions taken together, then what’s the other relatum? The thing-in-itself of which we cannot speak and therefore must be silent about?
Taking that approach has its appeal, no doubt, but it does raise the worry that there’s no real point of contact between us and the world at all, and that our perception+thought amount to a “frictionless spinning in the void,” as some contemporary philosophers put it. And then the only difference between science and postmodernism is, as Elizabeth put it, in the techniques used to prefer one model over another.
Carl
At least you’re using the proper terms of equivocation! You can’t actually assert that reality is unknowable, because that would demonstrate your self-contradiction too clearly.
Except for the truth-correlation claim that we approach reality asymptotically, as it were.
Since (by the “arguments” presented here) I have no means of discerning true statements that were actually said – or of determining, truthfully, what anyone actually means – then I may as well just invent whatever I want you to have said and to have meant:
“William, you are absolutely right!!! I’ve never had it explained to me so clearly before! You’re amazing! My old view was utter nonsense!”
That settles that.
My inclination is to look at correspondence as a theory of reality, rather than as a theory of truth. We pragmatically structure the world, and our descriptions are all relative to our structuring. So, at best, we can say that the truth of statement is its correspondence with our structuring. And then, by inference from what we take to be true statements about reality, we can draw conclusions as to the nature of reality.
This is like taking photographs of Saturn from the rockets we send there, evaluating the truth of those photographs on the basis of the optical properties of the cameras, and then inferring what Saturn is like on the basis of those true photographs.
That’s pretty much the best we could ever do in terms of finding out about reality.
It doesn’t matter one bit if you can know when it has been achieved or even that it can be achieved; it is a necessary assumption that we can deliberately discern true statements about reality, because even the claim that we cannot, or the claim that we might not be able to, is a truth claim about reality. Reality encompasses our ontological and epistemological premises, conclusions, and even assertions of vagueness and equivocal qualifiers like “it seems to me”.
Even something so equivocal as “it seems to me” … or “It might be that…” or even the ubiquitous “I think …” are truth-claims about reality – the reality of what the state of “you” is. Unless, of course, you’re not part of reality.
According to the argument presented, you cannot even tell me if it is true or not that it seems to you that correspondence theory is incomplete, because that would necessarily utilize correspondence theory as if true to make the truth claim about how it seems to you to be incomplete. IOW, “It seems to me that correspondence theory is incomplete” = “true state of my view”. If one questions that, it’s monkeys flinging feces.
That which is used to identify and discern truths cannot be used to identify and discern itself, so of course it is immune to that sort of scrutiny, a necessary blind spot, so to speak, the mystery. The principles of logic cannot be logically proven; they must be taken axiomatically, and are used to logically prove other things. Whether or not we can identify the commodity by which humans can discern true statements about reality is irrelevant to the fact that we must assume we have such a commodity (even if we intellectually deny it) in order live, think, act and argue, because even the act of denying it affirms it.
By what basis am I supposed to evaluate the arguments here? Logically, via some sort of capacity to discern true statements about reality? If not, then how? Whomever pays me the most? Word count? Grammer and spelling?
I can’t tell what self-contradiction this is supposed to be referencing. We might reword this to say that science does not deal in “proofs”, but rather in degree of support for particular models. In principle, ALL scientific theorie can be improved. Since the goal of scientific theories is to explain reality, and since they can be forever improved, that means we are forever falling short of a complete, exhaustive knowledge of reality. Nothing surprising there, certainly no self-contradiction.
What does this mean? It seems trivially obvious that our understanding of reality gets closer and closer, the better our models become, without ever being perfect. Perfect models can never be improved. Excellent models can be improved indefinitely.
The argument being made here is that you can approximate the truth of a statement, and as you learn more and understand more, your approximation can improve. This, as you were informed, is a continuum – an unbroken line with total ignorance at one end, and perfect knowledge at the other, with all understandings falling somewhere on that line, and capable of moving toward the perfect end even if never reaching it.
And you are indeed dichotomizing, making the rather foolish claim that if you do not know everything, THEREFORE you know nothing. But the idea behind science (and education, of course) is that with effort, you can learn more and more. There’s no good reason to look at how much there is to know, throw up your hands, and claim that the only alternative is total ignorance.
Of course, it’s pretty evident that some people are indeed strongly motivated to deny the concepts of improved knowledge and understanding. Education in that sense is a slippery slope out of the comfort zone of Absolute Certainty.
If you don’t believe your assertions are true, why bother stating them to me?
How about by taking the models implied by these arguments, and empirically testing the predictions these models make? That way, the more consistently accurate the predictions, the “truer” the model and hence the argument.
But I cheerfully grant that this approach assumes that evidence matters, and that the ability to make accurate predictions is a measure of the truth of a model. And that if the model is modified to make accurate predictions even more frequently, it’s even “truer”. YMMV.
How did you ever extract this interpretation from what you quoted? Nothing of the sort was either said or implied.
Flint,
Your characterization of my position and the argument I am engaged in entirely erroneous.
The world doesn’t seem to care whether there is correspondence or not.
But my field is psychology, and from where I stand it is not possible to assert correspondence. There is simply too much evidence for issusions and delusions. We do not need to trust evidence against correspondence. The existence of contradictory evidence is self affirming.
I am fatally handicapped by having access only to the words you write, and the words others write that you respond to. I wish this were not the case.
Sorry, no. If, and only if, we have presupposed and accepted the LNC — and with it the rest of the rot — can your statement be made. That is, the LNC et al, *are* the rigorous model of reality that underpins everything else. Without that it’s Not Even Wrong to call it “all just models” — it’s meaningless. For nothing is a model, and is, and we cannot compare, but can.
Asimov’s Relativity of Wrong is Not Even Wrong until we have a rigorous model of reality in which to understand it.
“It is not possible to assert correspondence” requires correspondence to assert.
“There is simply too much evidence for [illusions] and delusions” requires correspondence to assert.
This is like watching someone eat ice cream and that person seriously insists “I never eat ice cream”.
I didn’t really think the title of this thread was appropriate to start, but I do now.
Red flag: Change of subject. ‘Logic’ is not ‘symbolic logic.’ This is a fallacy. Also not a fallacy simultaneously.
By what standard. That is the very point behind all of this discourse. In that if there is no LNC — there is no standard. All the rest is pure sophistry.
That actually explains and excuses a lot of your nonsense and cognitive dissonance. Yours is one of several field whose only productive output is voluminous speech and grant writing exercises.
Hey, they’re just models. No, wait, damn that LOI, they’re just “things”, crap, no wait, it’s just stuff, you know, stuff we do stuff with, and it seems to me that if we do stuff with stuff, and stuff happens, then we can say stuff about stuff.
EAT THAT, Law of Identity!!!!
Neil:
You were quite keen on taking a preened defense over your careful use of ‘suggest.’ This suggests that you rape your neighbor’s children each Tuesday.
The why of this careful suggestion? There is a silver ring on my desk.
If you are not making a claim, and have made no claim, and do not intend to make a claim then the OP is vacuous. There is, of course, no relation between the examples you put it and what you sorta, maybe, possible suggest it suggsets. They’re all non-sequitors and you could have saved me all the trouble reading if you had just posted “I suggest WJM is a moron.”
It’s no more, nor no less, than the entire content of the mouth-breathing demonstration of mental deficiency we’re headlined with.
But these are only suggestions.