Louis
Posts: 6436
Joined: Jan. 2006
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| Quote ("Rev Dr" Lenny Flank @ Aug. 24 2007,20:22) | | Quote (Erasmus @ FCD,Aug. 24 2007,09:05) | | Didn't Russell say that formal logic does not work with sloppily defined propositions? |
But that is the entire point. ?It ALL comes down to "definitions". ?Here's the problem, though;
The question I am asking is a simple one: ?are brunettes hotter than blondes? ?And, of course, the relevant question behind that question is: is there any area that reason (or logic, or science, or kohlinar, or whatever anyone wants to call it) cannot answer (which is itself the result of the question "do science and religion necessarily conflict?"). ?My assertion, of course, is that no, science and religion need not inherently conflict, because yes, there are areas that science simply cannot answer -- one of those areas being moral, ethical or aesthetic judgements such as "are brunettes hotter than blondes?".
Louis, instead of just admitting that science and reason cannot answer ethical, moral or aesthetic questions, wants to change the question to make it into an "objective" question that science CAN answer, and that is why he is so hung up on the matter of "precise definitions". ?Indeed, when Louis asks me to DEFINE exactly what I mean by "hotter", he is, in essence, just asking me to answer the question for him, since science and reason simply can't answer it.
See, all Louis is doing is setting up an algorithm -- a perfectly rational algorithm that ruthlessly follows all the laws of logic. ?All you have to do is input the correct "definitions", turn the crank, and voila, out pops your perfectly rational logical answer. ?Simple, and works on any possible question.
The problem is that Louis's algorithm isn't actually ANSWERING anything. ?After all, it is the "definitions" themselves which determine the answer. ?If I define "hotter" as X, Y and Z, then lo and behold, Louis's algorithm will simply tell me that Girl A meets criteria X, Y and Z (according to the rational laws of logic) while Girl B doesn't. ?In other words, Louis is simply saying, "tell me what you think, and I'll tell you if this is what you think". ?Louis is simply measuring whether this or that thing meets my definition that I have already given him. ?
The real question, though, is can we determine (rationally, logically and scientifically) which "definitions" are the right ones?
If I give Louis my personal definition of "beauty", of course he can logically then tell me what I find to be "beautiful". ?BFD.
The real question that I keep asking (and that Louis keeps avoiding) is can science (or reason, or rationality, or logic, or kohlinar, or whatever else anyone wants to call it) determine whose definition of "beautiful" is the correct one?" ?Until we answer THAT fundamental question, then Louis's logical algorithm is just an exercise in reproduction. ?I define for him what I think is "beautiful", and he tells me, logically and rationally, what I think is "beautiful". ?So what.
The fundamental problem is precisely the fact that judgements like "beauty" or "justice" or "right and wrong" have no precise definitions. ?Or, more correctly, they have BILLIONS of precise definitions -- one for each person on the planet, and science and "reason" simply can't tell us which definition is the correct one. ?They are inherently "sloppy".
And because of that, science (or logic, or rationality, or kohlinar) simply cannot answer those questions. ?At best, they can run the algorithm and tell you whether this or that thing meets YOUR OWN definition. ?But they can't say a single word about whether your particular definition is any better or more correct than anyone else's. ?
All they can do is accept your own definition as a given assumption.
Arrrggghhh -- I edited to correct a typo, and got all these extraneous question marks. ?Ignore, please. |
Hi Lenny,
I'd agree with a lot of that except for two tiny things (which I've mentioned before, but don't worry, since you seem to be taking this discussion seriously I think I can be bothered to state them **again**). Well, okay, they ain't so tiny. Again you've missed the key part of the argument. So you'll forgive me for being a little pissed off that you have only just caught up to the very basic its of what I have been saying for pages. But hey, discussing this with you is INFINITELY better than discussing it with Skeptic, so we'll just have to have a beer and a smile and fucking forget about it! ;)
1) The undefined phrase "are blondes hotter than brunettes" is meaningless. It's a non sequitur but far more than that, without its context it is meaningless in ANY sense. It is the definition of what unanswerable is. And I mean unanswerable by any means whatsoever, be they reaosn, faith, subjective interpretation, anything anywhere. That is not an answerable question because it is not a question at all. It is nothing more than pretty noises in the air (or a collection of dark spots on my screen). Removing it from its context destroys its ability to inform hence its ability to even be a question.
I'm not changing the question because without context the question is meaningless. You keep saying that I am channging the question and that I am avoiding answering the universal question of whos's defintion of beauty (for example) is right (and you're wrong btw). I have precisely answered that question at least 3 times now.
I'll do it again since you seem to have skipped over in in your bid to restate your conclusions without support yet again:
The concept of beauty does not exist outside of its context. Beauty is not an inherent/intrinsic property of an object, like (for example) mass is.
Do you understand the distinction? You are asking me (or anyone) to say what is universally beautiful, i.e. as is there is some objective yardstick of beauty to which one can appeal. There is not. By the way, thus far this is the bit you and I agree about.
Where we part company is where you keep insisting that this can be done by some means other than reason or that it actually even makes sense as part of a "question". (How do I know you're doing this? Because you keep insisting that the context free question is actually a question when it ain't) It can't. It doesn't. This is why I am accusing you (quite rightly) of playing a rhetorical word game, because the very concept of beauty is utterly without meaning outside of its context and you are insisting that it is taken out of context, put into a phrase like a "question" and then that that "question" is answered. As I've said, in the absence of context the "are blondes hotter than brunettes?" phrase is not a question at all. It's meaningless noise. That is the issue YOU keep avoiding. It's also something I've been banging on about for a little while.
Do you see the fundamental incoherence of your own argument? What you are saying runs roughly thus:
"There exist non universal concepts. Give me a universal answer about some aspect of one of these non universal concepts".
Not only can that not be done by reason it cannot be done by any means at all. So the point I have been trying to hammer home for ooooo about 9 pages now is that INSOFAR as the question "are blondes hotter than brunettes?" be answered AT ALL it is answerable by reason. What you are doing is removing it from its context and insisting it must be answered, that context is what makes it answerable by any means. So do I think reason can answer aesthetic, moral, ethical and subjective questions? Yes I do PROVIDING those questions are in context (or defined if you prefer). More on this later.
The "next" fundamental mistake (I say "next", it's the same one) you are making is that you claim I am saying that reason can choose between two different definitions of "beauty" (for example). Nope, it can't, never claimed it could. But NOTHING can. The question again is meaningless.
So, as I said, right from the very start Lenny, you have been arguing against a straw man version of what I have been saying. The place we differ is you think that the contextless question "are blondes hotter than brunettes?" is still a question and I don't (and I've demonstrated WHY I think it's not a question whereas you have yet to demonstrate that it is a question at all, I may have pointed this out a while back, so forgive me if I am a little snarky that you haven't yet caught up). I also don't want to change the question, so please stop accusing me of that. I've said umpteen times now the questions you have asked are, out of context, unanswerable by reason, this is because they are unanswerable by any means at all. They are not questions in any meaningful sense of the word.
So, the bits you accurately sum up: I AM saying that reason etc can decide subjective matters within context, I am not saying that reason can decide between contexts. Change the word context for definition if you like. This is the bit we agree on, and have done since the word go. The relativist stuff is not controversial.
The burden falls to you to demonstrate that the question "are blondes hotter than brunettes" in the absence of defintions (context) is an actual question. In other words, since we've hopefully finally moved onto an intellectual plane above that of kindergarden, you have to demonstrate that the process of chosing between different contexts is open to any epistemological process, or is indeed an informative process at all. What does it mean to choose between two different concepts of "beauty" for example? Why should it be done? Why is it epistemologically valid, i.e. what information can be gained by doing so and how is it acheived?
2) The second bit of disagreement is much simpler. You appear to be saying that because we cannot get a perfect answer to a question we can have no answer at all. Or perhaps more precisely, that because reason cannot distinguish between two subjective contexts reason can tell us nothing about those subjective concepts.
If that IS what you are saying then I obviously disagree. Reason can tell us a HUGE amount about subjective questions within context. The fact you seem to airily dismiss as mere "telling you what you already know" covers a huge amount of stuff! So, to use Skeptic's question "Can reason tell you if murder is wrong or right?" yes it bloody well can in context and that is not an insiginificant thing! To caricature it as "We assume murder is wrong, therefore reason can tell us that murder is wrong based on that assumption" trivialises centuries of rational ethical philosophy. Reason can tell you murder is wrong based on a whole series of different axioms, none of which is "murder is wrong". That's quite important Lenny, and I really hope you are a) not dumb enough to deny it, and b) not dumb enough to continue mischaracterising reason as mere number crunching.
I'd also say that reason CAN help us to develop those axioms. Now I have to be careful here because I don't want to give you the wrong impression that I think reason can make my definition of "good" better than your definition of "good" in some universal sense (for example) because I don't. Try very carefully to follow what I am ACTUALLY saying:
What reason can do is given a very minimal series of axioms, take for example "extend the life span of the most people", a) develop the best system to fulfill the goals and stay within the limits of those axioms (i.e. tell you the best way to extend the lifespan of the most people), and b) tell you about the consequences of those axioms within a competing series of developed systems. That information can then be fed back to alter the original axioms. So to take the example "extend the life span of the most people" (which incidentally would lead to wra and horror the wolrd over if left unmodified! But remember it's merely an example) what we might find is that this axiom alone was not enough. How we would find this out is that there might be a series of unintended consequences which we didn't like, so we went back to modify the original axioms by adding "do no harm to other humans in acheiving this life span extension". We go out again, test this, and come back with a ravaged planet which we also decide we don't like so we add "keep fluffy animals happy too". and so on.
My point is that we can from a vague minimal set of ethical/moral axioms (which I agree cannot a priori be decided between on any basis) evolve a more effective ethical/moral system by the simple process of feeding back data from the consequences to those axioms. That is the very epitome of a rational, reasoned, objective, HELL I'll say it, SCIENTIFIC enterprise. Does it help us get started with the original axioms? Nope, but then nothing can. But it sure a shit helps us develop better ethical systems and answer ethical questions within those systems that might not be immediately obvious.
There is another cautious way that reason, and in this case science, can help to answer aesthetic, moral and subjective questions. That way is study.
Again, this is not something you can handwave away again Lenny. And AGAIN, please don't misunderstand this as an attempt to decide the universal truth of your concept of beauty vs mine. It's nothing of the sort. Study falls foul of one potential pitfall: the Is/Ought fallacy. In ethical terms, simply because something is the case it does not follow that it ought to be the case within a given ethical system. So for example the fact that genocide happens does not make genocide morally good.
Bearing that pitfall in mind, rational, reason based enquiry about the universe can tell us a lot of objective facts that are useful in informing our moral axioms, our notions of what constitutes beautiful etc. For example take the work of a huge number of sociologists and anthropologists in discovering what moral and ethical facets different societies have in common. There's a surprisingly large list:
Donald Brown's Human Universals
There are two important ways to misunderstand what I am saying here: 1) I am NOT saying that this allows us to distinguish between two different contexts in any universal sense (in the manner describe above), 2) I am NOT saying that this represents a perfect list which we SHOULD adopt. In other words, I am not in 1) making universal claims based on contextually limited concepts, 2) I am not falling foul of the Is/Ought fallacy I mentioned before.
What I AM saying is that we can (if we choose to, the choice to do so would itself be an axiom as defined above) use reason to inform our choice of axioms and we can use study of the universe around us to decide from the start which axioms go into our vague minimum set of initial axioms and which don't.
The same sort of thing applies to concepts of beauty for example. What humans find beautiful can be studied. This gives us a lot of information. What we can do with that information is try to see areas of concordance (just like we did with ethic etc) that exist across human societies. Perhaps we can even do this with non-human species also, although this is technically more challenging.
Again the principle I am trying to get across here is not that we can make absolute declarations about relativist concepts but that we can try to understand what concordances exist across our species about those relativist concepts and use those to inform both our definitions of those things and how we use them. I'll agree quite merrily that this doesn't help us decide a priori which moral axiom is better than another or which defintion of beauty is better than another but as I have banged on about endlessly above THERE IS NOTHING THAT CAN DO THIS, THE VERY IDEA THAT IS CAN BE DONE IS DERIVED ONLY FROM A LINGUISTIC TRICK, A MISTAKE IN REASONING.
It does however give us a reason based mechanism for the development of subjective systems. Yet again, I am more than cheerful to live with doubt (a la Feynman). I don't require moral certainty or a cast iron defintion of beautiful because I realise that, unlike mass, charge, spin, chemical composition etc, these concepts are not inherent properties of ANY object, they are concepts which only have meaning within a given context. They are, if you like emergent properties of that context. Scour the universe and you will not find one particle of beauty or superposition of moral states, they are fictions, constructs derived only from their contexts and nothing more. Hence why it is utterly meaningless and beyond stupud to claim that they exist in some objective fashion outside of the systems that give them their birth. Hence why the very phrases "are blondes hotter than brunettes" or "is murder wrong" are utterly and totally devoid of meaning. They are a linguistic fuck up, a rhetorical game they have no significance or meaning, they are fictions of your imagination and nothing more, mere fantastic drivel. They are not questions in any meaning of the word question. They are not informative, no information can be obtained from them. Get it yet? How many fucking times must I repeat myself only for you to completely ignore the single same point I have been making since post fucking number one and watch you make some fucking asinine straw man of what I AM saying.
Get it yet? If not, please give me some indication of how many times I have to repeat it until you do. Why the snark? because since post one I have been saying PRECISELY this and since post one you and Skeptic have grossly misunderstood/misrepresented what I have been saying extremely clearly. Try for the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to understand this simple fact.
Louis
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Bye.
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