{"id":31148,"date":"2016-03-20T17:16:23","date_gmt":"2016-03-20T17:16:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/?p=31148"},"modified":"2016-03-20T17:16:23","modified_gmt":"2016-03-20T17:16:23","slug":"god-said-let-there-be-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/god-said-let-there-be-light\/","title":{"rendered":"God said &#8220;Let there be light&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>No, this isn&#8217;t a religion thread.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a response to some posts in <a href=\"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/does-original-intentionality-exist\/\">the intentionality thread<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Quoting from Genesis:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to take that as a metaphor.\u00a0 I&#8217;ll take &#8220;let there be light&#8221; to stand for the evolution of light sensitive cells in some biological organisms.\u00a0 Once they had light sensitive cells, they had the possibility of distinguishing between light and dark.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>1:4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.<\/p>\n<p>1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I was taught that the most basic step in geometry is to draw a line, and divide the world into the part on one side of the line and that on the other side of the line.<\/p>\n<p>So, what we see here can be considered geometry.\u00a0 It is also an example of what philosophers describe as &#8220;carving the world at the seams&#8221;, except that there are no seams.\u00a0 We divide the external world on the basis of an internal criterion (the state of the light sensitive cells).<\/p>\n<p>This dividing can also be called &#8220;categorization&#8221;.\u00a0 That&#8217;s one of the possible meanings of &#8220;categorization&#8221;, and I see it as the important one.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->As a result, we now have two statements:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Daytime is when it is light;<\/li>\n<li>Nighttime is when it is dark.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I called these statements, rather than propositions.\u00a0 But lets discuss them as if they were propositions.\u00a0 Here are some things that we can say about them as propositions:<\/p>\n<p>(1)\u00a0 They are analytic propositions.\u00a0 That is to say, they are true by virtue of the meanings of their terms.\u00a0 In fact they are definitions or conventions that establish the meanings of the terms.<\/p>\n<p>(2) They are intentional propositions.\u00a0 That is to say, they are about something in the world.\u00a0 They define what they are about.\u00a0 They do not presuppose intentionality.\u00a0 They do not presuppose that we can already divide the world into meaningful parts.\u00a0 Rather, they tell us how to divide the external world based on internal criteria.\u00a0 So they define the parts of the world that they are about, and they then give names to those parts of the world.\u00a0 To me, this seems like original intentionality.<\/p>\n<p>(3) They are not tautologies (in my opinion).\u00a0 That is to say, they are not true in all possible worlds.\u00a0 They are true only in the world in which they act as definitions.<\/p>\n<p>(4) They are empirically significant.\u00a0 They allow us to make statements such as &#8220;I heard that noise at daytime&#8221; or &#8220;I heard that noise during nighttime&#8221;.\u00a0 That is to say, they give us the wherewithal to make finer empirical distinctions.<\/p>\n<p>I see these kinds of geometric acts as central to cognition, as central to intentionality.\u00a0 And yet philosophers seem to dismiss them out of hand.<\/p>\n<p>Quine has written two articles, &#8220;Truth by convention&#8221; and &#8220;Two Dogmas of Empiricism&#8221; which dismiss analytic propositions and conventions as unimportant.\u00a0 These two articles are generally considered influential and highly respected.\u00a0 To me, that&#8217;s like a herd of lemmings going over the cliff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No, this isn&#8217;t a religion thread.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a response to some posts in the intentionality thread. Quoting from Genesis: 1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. I&#8217;m going to take that as a metaphor.\u00a0 I&#8217;ll &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/god-said-let-there-be-light\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}