Acartia_Bogart
Posts: 2927
Joined: Sep. 2014
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| Quote | Kairosfocus
October 27, 2019 at 2:41 am
Seversky (& attn Hazel and EG et al),
On points of note:
>>That’s right and the very existence of a debate implies that there are at least two sides to the point at issue and that neither side has been able thus far to establish supremacy for their case.>>
1: Already shown as strawman fallacy. Disagreement does not imply that a claim disagreed with is false or undecidable or unknown. Warrant is different from consensus (which latter can be agreement in eror).
2: More directly, even this objection implicitly appeals to first duties of reason and to our recognition of obligation to such. Hence, again, the force of the first two SETs of the 12 which you refuse to acknowledge even while making objections that invariably, inescapably pivot on them. And, reminder with warrant is not empty repetition:
1] The first self evident moral truth is that we are inescapably under the government of ought.
(This is manifest in even an objector’s implication in the questions, challenges and arguments that s/he would advance, that we are in the wrong and there is something to be avoided about that. That is, even the objector inadvertently implies that we OUGHT to do, think, aim for and say the right. Not even the hyperskeptical objector can escape this truth. Patent absurdity on attempted denial. Expanding slightly: our rational, responsible intelligent behaviour is inescapably under the moral government of known duties to truth, to right reason, to prudence [so to warrant], to sound conscience, to neighbourliness [thus, the Golden Rule], to fairness and justice, etc. Thus, we find morally rooted law built into our morally governed nature, even for our intellectual life. Thus, too, the civil law extends what is already built in, to our social circumstances, turning on issues of prudence, justice and mutual duties; if it is to be legitimate. Notice, this is itself a theory on what law is or at least should be. And yes, all of this is fraught with implications for the roots of reality.)
2] Second self evident truth, we discern that some things are right and others are wrong by a compass-sense we term conscience which guides our thought. (Again, objectors depend on a sense of guilt/ urgency to be right not wrong on our part to give their points persuasive force. See what would be undermined should conscience be deadened or dismissed universally? Sawing off the branch on which we all must sit.)
3: What we are clearly seeing here is refusal to acknowledge a pivotal and manifestly true but ideologically inconvenient truth.
>>There is no self-referential absurdity.>>
4: Denial of what has been actually shown does not change the reality. At every turn you have appealed to the general binding force of what you try to project as emotional or subjective or relative.
>>I have never denied the existence or value of reason and logic but I regard them as human creations.>>
5: No one said you deny that we use reason and logic, or that such have no “value.” What has been at focal stake is how they work in the community of the rational or even in our internal reflection, i.e. we pivot on the first duties of reason as outlined: “our rational, responsible intelligent behaviour is inescapably under the moral government of known duties to truth, to right reason, to prudence [so to warrant], to sound conscience, to neighbourliness [thus, the Golden Rule], to fairness and justice, etc.”
6: The quoted assertion is actually a case in point.
>> Like visual and spoken language, logic and mathematics are modeling languages, for want of a better term, which enable us to synthesize models of the objective reality we assume to exist beyond us.>>
7: In short, language, symbols and so forth insofar as they express propositional claims [truth/falsity bearers] are generally structured to “model” — thus, more accurately, represent — reality. In other cases, they are used to mislead others to imagine the same.
8: Why is that? Precisely because we are governed by first duties of reason, starting with truth.
9: Reference to objective reality implies possibilities and undesirability of errors and delusions, again, reflecting duty to truth.
10: Objective also implies warrant leading to credible reliability of the claimed or implied accuracy of description. That is, it pivots on duties to right reason and prudence. Again and again you exemplify what you wish to overturn.
11: I note that objective reality is not equal to the material, physical world but includes abstract realities and relationships, including Mathematics and Logic etc.
>> The greater the fidelity of those models to what we can observe, the greater purchase they give us over that reality.>>
12: I have already pointed out on the case of Mathematical abstracta that reality and the concrete or material are not to be equated.
13: It is a property of a true claim or a sound argument [valid chain of inferences rooted in true premises] that such will be accurate, i.e. speak the truth. So, insofar as they address the empirical as itself accurately observed, they will reliably agree with it.
>>The value of a description can only be gauged by measuring it against what is described.>>
14: That is, implicit appeal to duty to truth
>>Logic and mathematics are valuable precisely because of their descriptive and predictive power in the observable universe.>>
15: Logic and Mathematics are also extremely valuable as opening up for us reliable windows on the world of things that are not physically observable. For example, implication and entailment are abstract relationships. Likewise, the infinitesimal and transfinite quantitative realms are unobservable but per logic of being, real. Moral obligations are also very real as the test case of a kidnapped, sexually assaulted and murdered child amply demonstrates.
16: Furthermore, logical positivism has collapsed over 50 years past because its verifiability principle is neither analytically true nor subject to empirical observational confirmation. Thus by its own claim it is meaningless.
>>Yes, for some people, deeply-held beliefs are immune to argument or consideration of rational alternatives but by declaring them to be SETs and attempting thereby to preclude any possibility of debate looks too much like trying to win by fiat.>>
17: A strawman and ad hominem. Go look in a mirror, please.
18: Note, again, the point of a self-evident truth: true, seen as necessarily so by one with the experience and insight to understand, where also the attempted denial immediately manifests patent absurdity. That is, there is not a need for an elaborate, complicated reductio argument. (Yes, proof by reduction to self-referential absurdity arrived at after complex technical stages establishes necessary truth but it is not self evident. There are many famous mathematical results in point, starting with discovery of irrationals in the ratio of diagonal of a square to its sides. And all such reductio arguments implicitly rely on the first principles and duties of reason. At every step. That is how pivotal what is on the table is. In the morally governed sphere of action, where we choose among possibilities, complex chains of risk and consequence are relevant and lead to other cogent arguments, but again at every step they rely on the first principles and duties of reason.)
19: As a typical case, try Josiah Royce’s proposition, E = error exists. Generally, readily understood to be true. Not so much seen as necessarily and self evidently true.
20: To see the latter, try the denial, ~E. But ~E MEANS that it would be an error to assert that error exists. Immediately, ~E is absurd and E must be true. E is undeniably true and self-evident. (Amazing, but it seems this has not soaked in after many years.)
21: Self evidence is demonstrably not the fallacy of closed mindedness and refusal to reason. Indeed, that brings up case 2. The first principles of right reason pivoting on distinct identity are unprovable as any attempt to prove will inevitably use these principles. You already saw how Epictetus elaborated this. If you read it.
22: The first duties of reason are inevitably involved in logic and are inescapable just like LOI, LNC, LEM. Taking all of these as inescapably true is not a failure to be rational or a case of closed-mindedness but is instead the first step to reasoning soundly.
23: Nor does this — and recall, this is precisely the focal matter — lock out debate. Just the opposite — your turnabout projection fallacy fails — we are establishing the foundation for sound, reasonable, responsible debate.
24: Nor is this empty “fiat” it is highlighting what is foundational, with a drawing out of why that should be recognised.
>>Moreover, claimed SETs which, by the correspondence theory, depend for their truth value on the extent to which they correspond to what they purport to describe are not true a priori. They are logically contingent in that they are grounded in the context of the observer’s experience and information.>>
25: I notice the unacknowledged retreat from trying to confine reality to the empirical world. I repeat, abstract realities are still realities, whether entities or relationships.
26: Our ability to recognise, understand and acknowledge SET’s will indeed pivot on our background experience and insight but our failure to understand does not entail that SETs are not just that, actually self-evident and true. True meaning, accurately describing relevant aspects of reality.
>>as we have noted before, if you accept the correspondence theory of truth then moral claims are neither true nor false because they are not claims about what is but about what ought to be.>>
27: Your repeating an already corrected error does not transmute it into truth.
28: First, truth describes what is, but what is so, reality, includes not only material tangible or physically observable entities but abstract entities, structures and relationships of many kinds. Such include, mathematical and logical abstracta, thus too the first duties of reason.
29: In short it can be and is true that our intelligent life is governed by known duties to “to truth, to right reason, to prudence [so to warrant], to sound conscience, to neighbourliness [thus, the Golden Rule], to fairness and justice, etc.” Indeed, it can be and is manifestly true that such are inescapable in reasoning . . . as your own objections repeatedly exemplify.
>>On the question of moral governance,>>
30: Government, not governance as was highlighted earlier tonight.
>> it seems to me the debate is not about its value to a society but its source or warrant.>>
31: Notice, how you here appeal to duties to truth, right reason, prudence and justice? Inescapable, yet again.
32: Here, we have already seen the source: inescapably thus self-evidently true. And at every turn where you headshake, jump, run and turn to try to throw the hook of moral SET’s you simply underscore their inescapability.
>> As an a/mat I have no problem admitting that human societies are stronger, more resilient and more cohesive when guided by moral principles.>>
33: Could this be, shocker, because such core first duties of reason happen to be true and self-evident?
>>On the objection to the consensus theory that, in Nazi Germany, a majority would have voted in favor of the Final Solution, while it’s possible, I doubt it would happen.>>
34: A majority voted in favour of the Nazi regime and its governance structures and principles. Indeed, up until manifest catastrophic defeat was staring them in the face, Hitler remained the most popular leader in German history. He won that popularity by restoring order and breaking the depression in Germany, then delivering a chain of astonishing geostrategic victories, first diplomatically then militarily.
35: And in fact majorities can form or support the worst tyrannies — the terror in France had mass support until people finally woke up to its implications. The manipulated or benighted mob on a march of folly is a clear danger of democratic systems. That’s why there are no pure democracies today.
>>When it comes right down to it, we don’t need concepts like self-evident truths and inescapable moral governance.>>
36: When we turn to first principles and duties of reason, we cannot escape them. The issue is not their self-evidence on that foundational inescapability but our willingness to acknowledge it.
37: At every turn above, you manifest that inescapability but are unwilling to acknowledge manifest truth. The reasons are obvious, such would radically undermine a worldview you have declared commitment to.
Okay, that should be enough to make the issues clearer.
KF |
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