Retorsion argument, first principles and non-classical logic

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Posted by SapereAude
4/05/2018 3:09 pm
#21

seigneur wrote:

When it comes to pure metaphysics (ontology in particular), they get quite clear, e.g. in Advaita Vedanta that thou shalt not mix up self and not-self, in Buddhism that it's a fatal error to attribute essence to anything (or any thing), etc.

But Hegel does precisely the opposite! Thou shalt mix up self and not-self! Speaking of logic proper, I think Hegel is the right choice. His Science of Logic is just formidable being a radical challenge to the statics of Aristotle's Prior Analytics. And what is the matter with combining epistemology and metaphysics? Since Kant it's been inevitable.
Sure, Hegel is absolutly unreadable but that's another issue.

Last edited by SapereAude (4/05/2018 3:11 pm)


Every proposition of geometry is absolutely necessary, and in this way one talked about an object lying entirely outside the sphere of our understanding as if one understood quite well what one meant by this concept. The unconditioned necessity of judgments, however, is not an absolute necessity of things.
 
Posted by Greg
4/05/2018 6:31 pm
#22

SapereAude wrote:

Ever heard of Hegel?

Wikipedia: Central to Hegel's conception of knowledge and mind (and therefore also of reality) was the notion of identity in difference, that is that mind externalizes itself in various forms and objects that stand outside of it or opposed to it, and that, through recognizing itself in them, is "with itself" in these external manifestations, so that they are at one and the same time mind and other-than-mind. This notion of identity in difference, which is intimately bound up with his conception of contradiction and negativity, is a principal feature differentiating Hegel's thought from that of other philosophers.

Hegel cites a number of fragments of Heraclitus in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. One to which he attributes great significance is the fragment he translates as "Being is not more than Non-being", which he interprets to mean
Sein und Nichts sei dasselbe
Being and non-being are the same.
 

I am never sure what I'm supposed to think when I hear claims like this. Is there any proposition which you propose I should believe and disbelieve?

 
Posted by Greg
4/05/2018 6:44 pm
#23

DanielCC wrote:

Kant although incredibly influential in terms of ethics is of comparatively little interest in theory of knowledge and even less in ontology.

I'm not sure what you mean. It is hard to think of a modern philosopher of greater influence than Kant in the theory of knowledge and ontology. It is no exaggeration to say that both the continental and analytic traditions would not have come into existence without him. A not insignificant handful of the most influential 20th century analytics, like C.I. Lewis, P.F. Strawson, Wilfrid Sellars, and Donald Davidson, were kinds of Kantians. His influence was great enough that Rorty could complain:

[Kant] simultaneously gave us a history of our subject, fixed its problematic, and professionalized it (if only by making it impossible to be taken seriously as a "philosopher" without having mastered the first Critique​).

​(I've read your "but" as contrasting his influence in ethics with his influence in theory of knowledge and ontology, which seems unintelligible to me since his influence in the latter areas was so massive. But perhaps you're rather expressing your own view of how much "interest" he is of in those areas, independent of how completely he has defined their modern modern trajectory.)

 
Posted by SapereAude
4/06/2018 12:52 am
#24

Greg wrote:

It is hard to think of a modern philosopher of greater influence than Kant in the theory of knowledge and ontology. It is no exaggeration to say that both the continental and analytic traditions would not have come into existence without him.

Yes, like it or hate it, it's just the fact—Immanuel Kant is the central figure in modern philosophy.

Greg wrote:

I am never sure what I'm supposed to think when I hear claims like this. Is there any proposition which you propose I should believe and disbelieve?

As far as I understand, Hegel's project aims to create a dynamic philosophy, a philosophy of process. Aristotle's static logic demonstrably leads to paradoxes (Zeno), so, being a complete system in itself, it poorly grasp things as they are in reality, i.e. in time, in motion. Sure, we use AL on a daily basis, but that only on condition that we consider objects as being static. It's a bit like Newton's physics to be enough for everyday calculations than to use Einstein's. Nobody is quite sure how to implement Hegel's dialectical logic, but it just cannot be bypassed in modern philosophical reasoning.


Every proposition of geometry is absolutely necessary, and in this way one talked about an object lying entirely outside the sphere of our understanding as if one understood quite well what one meant by this concept. The unconditioned necessity of judgments, however, is not an absolute necessity of things.
 
Posted by seigneur
4/06/2018 2:07 am
#25

SapereAude wrote:

And what is the matter with combining epistemology and metaphysics? Since Kant it's been inevitable.
Sure, Hegel is absolutly unreadable but that's another issue.

 
The issue is exactly readability. It's not another issue.

Better one topic at a time. When you combine topics, especially big ones, it takes good common sense to keep it brief, such as in a koan.

With extreme examples like Hegel and Kant, it's not a pseudo-issue or a side-issue. With their unreadability they are risking being useless, because they cannot be understood or can easily be misunderstood - and occasionally you can see they cannot make sense of themselves.

 
Posted by SapereAude
4/06/2018 8:39 am
#26

seigneur wrote:

With their unreadability they are risking being useless, because they cannot be understood or can easily be misunderstood...

There is nothing to argue about—life is too short. My position is as follows: if there is something valuable in a philosopher's writings that must be transferable into other words. So, I read only secondary literature not bothering a bit about unimportant subtleties.


Every proposition of geometry is absolutely necessary, and in this way one talked about an object lying entirely outside the sphere of our understanding as if one understood quite well what one meant by this concept. The unconditioned necessity of judgments, however, is not an absolute necessity of things.
 
Posted by FrenchySkepticalCatholic
4/06/2018 10:29 am
#27

SapereAude wrote:

Aristotle's static logic demonstrably leads to paradoxes (Zeno), so, being a complete system in itself, it poorly grasp things as they are in reality, i.e. in time, in motion. Sure, we use AL on a daily basis, but that only on condition that we consider objects as being static. It's a bit like Newton's physics to be enough for everyday calculations than to use Einstein's. Nobody is quite sure how to implement Hegel's dialectical logic, but it just cannot be bypassed in modern philosophical reasoning.

Heavily disagree with you here. You're implicitly saying that these paradoxes are final.

SapereAude wrote:

Yes, like it or hate it, it's just the fact—Immanuel Kant is the central figure in modern philosophy.

So, if flat-earthers are the new trend, should we follow them? No. I believe that Kant did a botched answer to Hume, by fixing a broken leg with a sticking plaster. His antinomies are the worst : once you rub them, they fall down. In Europe, we're plagued by Kant, and we're slowly removing him from the gold pedestal he's standing on.

Hegel is even worse, as he mixed being and non being, and did say, basically, that opposites are equal :

SapereAude wrote:

Sein und Nichts sei dasselbe
Being and non-being are the same.
 

As you said somewhere else

SapereAude wrote:

If anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I'd rather go with

 “Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I could keep the truth and let God go.”

― Meister Eckhart

I'll stick to my blunt point : to philosophies and logic that claims to dispense with rational first principles, to philosophers producing word salads and semantic islands, off to the bin.

God bless,
FSC

 
Posted by Miguel
4/06/2018 12:28 pm
#28

UGADawg wrote:

Aren't non-classical logics fairly common in some kinds of work in computer science?

 
Yes, but that doesn't mean PNC is false or we don't need it to reason. As I said, what happens is that they can stull manipulate symbols with some success without using certain syntactic rules, so (idiots) who think PNC is just a syntactic rule of symbollic manipulation sometimes end up thinking we don't need PNC.

Aristotle's own logic is paraconsistent, by the way.


DanielCC wrote:

Miguel wrote:

Dialetheists and those who deny a first principle like PNC are worse than eliminativists. Much, much worse. If you think the eliminativist position is crazy, you should know logical revisionism is 10x crazier.

I am surprised by this - dialatheists can offer criterion for where the PNC will not hold e.g. conflicts between different linguistic/proportional systems, and alleged instances of it not holding i.e. self-referential paradoxes like the Liar. There are no even apparent instances of consciousness being an illusion (due to the analytical absurdity of that statement).

 
It is worse because while eliminativism is moronic and directly refuted by any conscious experience, eliminativists are at least trying to use reason in a sense; they wouldn't think that something can both be and not be in the same respect and at the same time. Their mental confusion may be a little more understandable, because they are still somehow trying to follow reason.

Dialetheists, by contrast, reject reason and accept false reason. They point to "arguments" which could only work if they themselves are wrong and, worse, they say without blushing that something can both be and not be in the same respect and at the same time. This contradicts the primordial experience of being -- that there is being and not absolute nothingness -- which is more basic than even a formulation of what conscious experience is (since that will also require being to be being and not non-being).

 
Posted by Ouros
4/06/2018 3:18 pm
#29

Well, there was a lot of thing since my last post. :-D

DanielCC wrote:

I am not sure what you mean so this response will focus on the first. No we do not have to justify something’s seeming to be the case - it’s the sceptic’s job to try to drive a wedge between appearance and reality (which historically they have attempted to do by a number of arguments with interesting results) - the sceptic cannot start with a presumption of guilt (this seems to confuse the sceptical project with Descartes’ project, which is to assume everything which can mislead does mislead).

But why can’t he start with a presumption of guilt?Maybe you’re thinking about inconsistency in his own life: but if that’s the case, why couldn’t he be inconsistent? And when to draw the line between what seems to be real, and what seems to be a simple illusion?

FrenchySkepticalCatholic wrote:

Hey, Ouros,

I think you're putting too much into these non-classical logics. So far, I've seen nothing really scary about "well, the law of excluded middle doesn't hold". Alright, what does it even mean? Does it mean that such a law is FALSE? If so, it's also true?

I take most of these logic to be a huge appeal to idealism and to divorcing yourself from reality, and I wouldn't spend much time into them.

God bless,

FSC

 Well, obviously those who relativize those basics laws are anti-realist, but precisely! I want to know what we can say to them. ;-)

John West wrote:

BV's argument doesn't depend on Kant's transcendental idealism, guys.

 What argument exactly?

seigneur wrote:

Let's go over it again.
The answer to the question depends on the scope of the "certain domain" in the above paragraph. Does the "certain domain" touch metaphysics? We have no examples that it does, so the question has no basis.

 But it touches to how we can justify them. If the same method can justify two things, and we discovered after that one of them was in fact wrong, the other became less-justified, if not completely unjustified.

seigneur wrote:

This conclusion also depends on the scope of the "certain domain". It's necessary to see an example how anyone does metaphysics by denying e.g. the law of non-contradiction.

The whole exercise looks like claiming that there's this tool I have therefore that other tool probably doesn't work, without considering properly what the tools are for. The tools could be for different domains.

You can't say that you have a nail gun, it hits nails one by one, and therefore fractions in math are wrong or fallible. A nail gun has nothing to do with math, has no effect on it. Similarly, when you deny the law of non-contradiction, you can't do metaphysics. Or maybe you can, but then please show the result and we'll see whose metaphysics is better in some respect, if any.

 Well, didn’t buddhists did something like that?

seigneur wrote:

The skeptic does not belong to #3, because we don't do metaphysics for skeptics. We do metaphysics for ourselves to see if we can make coherent sense of the universe. If the skeptic does not care about coherence, how is that my problem or a problem for my metaphysics?

 Well, that’s a problem for how you justify it, and not only for the other, but also for yourself.

FrenchySkepticalCatholic wrote:

So, if flat-earthers are the new trend, should we follow them? No. I believe that Kant did a botched answer to Hume, by fixing a broken leg with a sticking plaster. His antinomies are the worst : once you rub them, they fall down. In Europe, we're plagued by Kant, and we're slowly removing him from the gold pedestal he's standing on.

Well, yeah, we are on the same page here. I don’t know if you saw that program where Paul Clavier, who you may know, was talking about natural theology, and directly the first answer from another philosopher was basically “HUME! KANT! AZBLBLLBL!” : https://youtu.be/4asQdVSRP7k?t=6m33s
Gosh, even Pavlov’s dogs were slower than her. We depart a little from the subject, but clearly, everyone, if you desperate because of how everyone answers big questions in America/England, don’t cry because in the “francophonie”, people don’t even ask them anymore.

Miguel wrote:

Yes, but that doesn't mean PNC is false or we don't need it to reason. As I said, what happens is that they can stull manipulate symbols with some success without using certain syntactic rules, so (idiots) who think PNC is just a syntactic rule of symbollic manipulation sometimes end up thinking we don't need PNC.

Aristotle's own logic is paraconsistent, by the way.

Didn’t even know about Aristotle’s logic.Do you some advice for reading about both subject (Aristote’s logic and laws of thoughts as only syntactic rules)?

Miguel wrote:

It is worse because while eliminativism is moronic and directly refuted by any conscious experience, eliminativists are at least trying to use reason in a sense; they wouldn't think that something can both be and not be in the same respect and at the same time. Their mental confusion may be a little more understandable, because they are still somehow trying to follow reason.

Dialetheists, by contrast, reject reason and accept false reason. They point to "arguments" which could only work if they themselves are wrong and, worse, they say without blushing that something can both be and not be in the same respect and at the same time. This contradicts the primordial experience of being -- that there is being and not absolute nothingness -- which is more basic than even a formulation of what conscious experience is (since that will also require being to be being and not non-being).

 Well, wouldn’t that only mean that for us, being is not non-being? It’s still leave the possibility that something is and is not.

 

 
Posted by John West
4/06/2018 8:28 pm
#30

Ouros wrote:

What argument exactly?

Haha. Come on, Ouros! Bill writes in good, clear English. (He's giving counterexamples to the thesis that retorsion arguments for theses establish those theses as laws of reality.)

 


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