On Government

[smh_23]

By the way, the argument is explained at length. Read it if you are actually going to try to argue against this guy. Be sure to refute the explications, like the one I quoted after the argument. Just to refresh your memory on what they’re like:

How can polyadic second-order quantification be introduced? One way–the
one I initially pursued in Mathematics without Numbers–is to resort to
brute force: since only conceptual possibilities matter. one can postulate
enough extraneous atoms to code ordered pairs of given individuals: relations
are then coded as wholes of pairs. But more recently. more general and elegant
methods were developed by Burgess and Lewis [I991], ingeniously
combining mereology with plural quantification. It needs to be assumed that
there are infitely many atoms (or individuals behaving enough like atoms).
but, for modal-structural mathematics it suffices to entertain this merely
hypothetically. Then (following Burgess’ construction) unordered pairs of
atoms (diatomic wholes) can code a 1-1 correspondence between all the atoms
and some of them, and some other diatoms can code a second l-l correspon-
dence between all the atoms and others entirely discrete from (not overlap-
ping) the first targets. (To insure this much. one must assume a kind of partition of all the atoms into three disjoint pieces, (a part of) each equinumerous with the remaining two. something which can be expressed with plural quantification and mereology.) Then one can make sense of the “first image”
of any given individual, i.e. the sum (fusion) of the images of its atoms
under the first 1-1 correspondence, and the “second image” of a given individual, the sum of the images of its atoms under the second 1-1 correspondence.
These images are always discrete from one another. The ordered pair of two,
possibly overlapping individuals is then defined as the sum of the first image
of the one to be first and the second image of the one to be second. Relations
are then available by quantifying plurally over ordered pairs. All this is
relative to a given trisection of the given infinitude of atoms, and it is
cumbersome to write it all out. But it works. The upshot is a nominalistic
reduction of arbitrary n-adic relations in the language of tenereology and
(monadic) plural quantification.

[pat]

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]NickViar wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

The question isn’t whether something can calculate it, it’s whether or not the proposition is true. Is the proposition true in a world with nothing but rocks?
[/quote]

And how do we find out if the proposition is true?[/quote]

Who is “we” in a world with nothing but rocks?[/quote]

Exactly.

The question is “will this calculation hold in world X”?

The only way to answer the question is to do the calculation in world X.

If world X is meant to be a world without minds, then the question is internally contradictory (invalid), because a mind is necessary for the doing of the calculation.

[/quote]

Requiring it be known to be true is not important, is it true or not?[/quote]

Take a look at that sentence again.

In order for me to answer, what will I have to do? I will have to know whether it is true or not, yes? In the world in question. Yes?

See?[/quote]

Yes, you know it’s either true or false, but that’s not the point. It doesn’t matter if you know it or not. Is something that is true, always true regardless of our knowledge of it or not?
Let’s forget math, how about the laws of physics? We don’t know them all, but is what we don’t know about physics true even though we don’t know it yet?

Holy shit, I am sick as hell. If I get incoherent I apologize, I am doing my best, but my brain is wracked.

[smh_23]

I have to go now anyways, I do hope you feel better, our strong differences notwithstanding. I will be back later. If you are going to argue against the philosopher whose work I cited, you do need to take the time to read it in full.

[pat]

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

I would like to see the case that math is physical be made. Can you put together a case? Argument or prose I don’t care.[/quote]

Specific arguments–on both sides–have been made by people who spent their lives studying these things. Neither you nor I can understand them, and neither you nor I can refute them. What I am trying to do here is to get you to see that you know far less than you believe you know. “physicalism/Platonic idealism is not true” or “mathematics do/do not supervene on the physical” are, as claims, over-reaches by people who study these things for a living. Made by you and me, they are infinitely worse.[/quote]

So this is an ego thing? Your not asserting a position just contradicting mine to show me I don’t know a whole lot?[/quote]

No, this is not an ego thing. You made a series of claims to certainty which you cannot justify. That’s what this is.
[/quote]
What claims are these?

[quote]

I have already gone through these exercises a long time ago. They are complex to explain the genesis of everyone though and to write lengthy proofs on why a proposition is true or false.[/quote]

Why do you say things like this? It’s beyond fatuous. I am very familiar with your grasp of logical reasoning. You can’t write or critique a fraction of a hundredth of the work that’s been done on the philosophy of mathematics. Not platonism, not nominalism. None of it. Do you know what it looks like? It looks like this:

I think you think you know me, but you don’t. At all. I am aware of the massive collection of work done over time. Nobody can know all of it. Even the best of the best may know a hundredth of it. Such is the breadth of knowledge.

(1) Synthetic claims of existence should not be given great credence
without strong evidential support.
(2) Existence claims for mathematical abstracta, especially the Axiom of
Infnity, that there exists an infnite set or even plurality, are
synthetic.
(3) There is no good direct evidence for such existence claims. For
instance. contra early efforts of Maddy. we do not perceive sets. and.
in any case. not infnite sets. which classical analysis requires.
(4) The best indirect evidence comes via scientific indispensability argu-
ments. However. alternative programs such as predicativism.
Chihara’s semantic modal-nominalism, and my modal-structuralism
separately and cumulatively undercut such arguments. (For certain
portions of science. Field’s nominalistic constructions also undercut
them.)
(5) The fact that current science takes mathematics for granted is not
good evidence that premise (1) is suspended in the case of mathemat-
ics when viewed from a naturalistic-scientific standpoint.
The conclusion is. therefore.
(6) The evidence currently available for mathematical abstracta is quite
weak. and so we should not put much credence in a face-value.
platonist reading.

[…]

How can polyadic second-order quantification be introduced? One way–the
one I initially pursued in Mathematics without Numbers–is to resort to
brute force: since only conceptual possibilities matter. one can postulate
enough extraneous atoms to code ordered pairs of given individuals: relations
are then coded as wholes of pairs. But more recently. more general and elegant
methods were developed by Burgess and Lewis [I991], ingeniously
combining mereology with plural quantification. It needs to be assumed that
there are infitely many atoms (or individuals behaving enough like atoms).
but, for modal-structural mathematics it suffices to entertain this merely
hypothetically. Then (following Burgess’ construction) unordered pairs of
atoms (diatomic wholes) can code a 1-1 correspondence between all the atoms
and some of them, and some other diatoms can code a second l-l correspon-
dence between all the atoms and others entirely discrete from (not overlap-
ping) the first targets. (To insure this much. one must assume a kind of partition of all the atoms into three disjoint pieces, (a part of) each equinumerous with the remaining two. something which can be expressed with plural quantification and mereology.) Then one can make sense of the “first image”
of any given individual, i.e. the sum (fusion) of the images of its atoms
under the first 1-1 correspondence, and the “second image” of a given individual, the sum of the images of its atoms under the second 1-1 correspondence.
These images are always discrete from one another. The ordered pair of two,
possibly overlapping individuals is then defined as the sum of the first image
of the one to be first and the second image of the one to be second. Relations
are then available by quantifying plurally over ordered pairs. All this is
relative to a given trisection of the given infinitude of atoms, and it is
cumbersome to write it all out. But it works. The upshot is a nominalistic
reduction of arbitrary n-adic relations in the language of tenereology and
(monadic) plural quantification.

Hellman, Geoffrey. “On Nominalism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3):691-705 (2001)

Go look that up and read it and tell me that you

1. Understand what’s being said and

2. Can deny any of it.

You do that, I’ll buy you Metabolic Drive for rest of your life.

I anticipate the responses: “That’s not fair, you’re quoting esoteric jargon that only one or two members of this entire forum can understand.”

To which I reply, again, that it isn’t my fault that I’m debating someone who makes these laughable claims about entire philosophical schools which he says he knows to be bullshit…while not being able to differentiate between a valid and an invalid argument in propositional logic.

Edited[/quote]

Why are you being a jerk?
I take exception to premise 1 and I don’t believe premise 2 follows. Premise one deals with a demand for evidence for the synthetic a priori premise 2 takes evidence and says it’s not evidence?
As Kamui would say Kant wins again:

Analytic a posteriori judgments cannot arise, since there is never any need to appeal to experience in support of a purely explicative assertion.
Synthetic a posteriori judgments are the relatively uncontroversial matters of fact we come to know by means of our sensory experience (though Wolff had tried to derive even these from the principle of contradiction).
Analytic a priori judgments, everyone agrees, include all merely logical truths and straightforward matters of definition; they are necessarily true.
Synthetic a priori judgments are the crucial case, since only they could provide new information that is necessarily true. But neither Leibniz nor Hume considered the possibility of any such case.
Unlike his predecessors, Kant maintained that synthetic a priori judgments not only are possible but actually provide the basis for significant portions of human knowledge. In fact, he supposed (pace Hume) that arithmetic and geometry comprise such judgments and that natural science depends on them for its power to explain and predict events. What is more, metaphysics�¢??if it turns out to be possible at all�¢??must rest upon synthetic a priori judgments, since anything else would be either uninformative or unjustifiable. But how are synthetic a priori judgments possible at all? This is the central question Kant sought to answer.

synthetic a priori proposition, in logic, a proposition the predicate of which is not logically or analytically contained in the subject�¢??i.e., synthetic�¢??and the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience�¢??i.e., a priori. Thus the proposition �¢??Some bodies are heavy�¢?? is synthetic because the idea of heaviness is not necessarily contained in that of bodies. On the other hand, the proposition �¢??All husbands are male�¢?? is analytic because the idea of maleness is already contained in that of husband. In general the truth or falsity of synthetic statements is proved only by whether or not they conform to the way the world is and not by virtue of the meaning of the words they contain. Synthetic a priori knowledge is central to the thought of Immanuel Kant, who argued that some such a priori concepts are presupposed by the very possibility of experience.

What are you quoting without attribution here?[/quote]

The issue boils down with whether or not synthetic apriori judgments do infact exist. The author requires substantial evidence, but fails to define what constitutes evidence.
Since he was essentially taking on Kant, I quoted what Kant has to say about synthetic a priori judgements.
Maybe I don’t get it. But how did he get from 1 to 2.

“(1) Synthetic claims of existence should not be given great credence
without strong evidential support.
(2) Existence claims for mathematical abstracta, especially the Axiom of
Infnity, that there exists an infnite set or even plurality, are
synthetic.”

For number one I must ask why? What sort of evidence is required? And if the evidence is defined and thus given, the the whole thing falls apart. What constitutes evidence in the first premise?
For 2, I wonder how the hell he it follows from 1. The claims of mathematical abstracts go all the way back to numbers themselves. Why even bring up infinity or set theory infinities?
Numbers are not necessarily infinite. We just don’t know what the limit is if their is one. In either case, how does that invalidate the abstaction of numbers.

Premise 3:
‘(3) There is no good direct evidence for such existence claims. For
instance. contra early efforts of Maddy. we do not perceive sets. and.
in any case. not infnite sets. which classical analysis requires.’

When the hell did sets magically appear as the pure and only definition of mathematical abstraction? And how does that invalidate numeric abstraction.

Then he says something really bizarre in premise 5:
“(5) The fact that current science takes mathematics for granted is not
good evidence that premise (1) is suspended in the case of mathemat-
ics when viewed from a naturalistic-scientific standpoint.
The conclusion is. therefore.”

The fact that current science takes mathematics for granted? How this fuck what this established? What scientific consensus was there that says current science takes mathematics for granted?
Is this guy out of his fucking mind? Science takes math for granted? Based on what? Bullshit. Science in as far as I know, takes math extremely seriously not for granted. That’s a bullshit, completely unsubstantiated premise. That’s an opinion best kept to himself. This is the worst premise in the argument.

So then this conclusion:
‘(6) The evidence currently available for mathematical abstracta is quite
weak. and so we should not put much credence in a face-value.
platonist reading.’

Based on what that synthetic a priori abstracts need what kind of evidence? So we should not put much value in platonist reading because he thinks science takes math for granted? Seriously? At least when a shred of evidence appears the author will admit he was wrong I suppose? He leaves himself open to that at least. Though he never defines what would constitute evidence, that needs to be cleared up.

I’d like Kamui’s take on this argument. I think premise 4 fucked it up badly.

[Facepalm_Death]

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

[quote]kamui wrote:
That’s pretty close :

Si les droits n’existaient pas, il faudrait les inventer.

But indeed, the fact is that we can’t invent them arbitrarily.

So, even if there is no “natural right”, the “invention of right” still has some structural rules.

This is enough to disprove a strictly positivist position.
And it makes the idea of “natural rights” pretty close to the truth in practice, if not exactly/technically/epistemologically true,[/quote]

In practice, without any external force guiding them, people would believe their rights are infinite, they are “allowed” (they would never think of using this term) to do whatever they want, nothing would ever restrict their actions except what is physically impossible.

Then as people interact and form cooperative relationships, conflicts arise. Person A takes an apple from person B. Person B feels “wronged” but doesn’t know what it means, but he still acts on it. Person B takes the apple back from Person A and Person A feels wronged. Now both people feel “wronged” but both have done the same wrong thing. At this point they may come to an agreement : don’t take my apple and i won’t take yours, or they might even form the general rule :no one can take anothers apples etc. realistically this situation would escalate in a revenge cycle until both people are trying to kill each other, and this would repeat over and over until people collectivly agreed not to steal

But the point is, everything seems to be a natural right at first, the only thing that is ever contructed is a restriction of rights[/quote]

I think if you start layering ‘wrongs’ I think you start to confuse the issue. It’s not that it’s not a proper ethical inquiry in itself. What we don’t want to confuse is what a natural right, being argued for and against is.
In this case it’s the right of a person to not be willfully wronged by another person. Does this right exist? [/quote]

I have quoted “wrong” because I have actually taken a step back from the dicotomy in this thought experiment.

I will think of a better way to explain all this. Until then consider this: Do animals wait for permission (a declaration of “rights”) to do what they must to survive? No. They just act.

Humans do the same thing. However, we can use higher logic, and we can recognize others as being just like us. When we come into conflict with each other, even without ANY existing social structure, it is possible for us to recognize a deadlock because of this. A is physically capable of Taking from B and vice versa. They could take the same thing from each other back and forth forever, but eventually reach an agreement: I will not take what is in your hand if you do not take what is in mine. It requires no reference to “rights” or a “social contract” for both parties to see the value in it.

What I’m saying is “rights” if they exist, can only ever be defined negatively, by placing a restriction on what others can do. The “rights” we have are nothing more than leftovers after restrictions have been placed.

[/quote]
I agree mostly. I don’t know that they can only be described negatively it certainly easier to do so. The ‘do no harm’ contingent of natural rights is the easiest way to talk about it.[/quote]

Right, and it is the most reliable way to truthfully speak about it without gray areas. A logical person would not agree to statements of rights such as “you may steal from me and I may steal from you” or “you may kill my family and I may kill your family”. We can accept these propositions without dispute from other rational people.

The positive statements of rights such as “humans have a right to freedom” or humans have a right to privacy" have many gray areas when they are analyzed which is why they are disputed.

Negatively defined “commandments” that basically fall under “do not harm others” can be considered logically necessary and this is satisfactory to most people.

I would not dispute that there are certain rights we should have that are positively defined, but logically demonstrating their necessity is not simple and not likely to be agreed upon.

[Facepalm_Death]

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

I would like to see the case that math is physical be made. Can you put together a case? Argument or prose I don’t care.[/quote]

Specific arguments–on both sides–have been made by people who spent their lives studying these things. Neither you nor I can understand them, and neither you nor I can refute them. What I am trying to do here is to get you to see that you know far less than you believe you know. “physicalism/Platonic idealism is not true” or “mathematics do/do not supervene on the physical” are, as claims, over-reaches by people who study these things for a living. Made by you and me, they are infinitely worse.[/quote]

So this is an ego thing? Your not asserting a position just contradicting mine to show me I don’t know a whole lot?[/quote]

No, this is not an ego thing. You made a series of claims to certainty which you cannot justify. That’s what this is.
[/quote]
What claims are these?

[quote]

I have already gone through these exercises a long time ago. They are complex to explain the genesis of everyone though and to write lengthy proofs on why a proposition is true or false.[/quote]

Why do you say things like this? It’s beyond fatuous. I am very familiar with your grasp of logical reasoning. You can’t write or critique a fraction of a hundredth of the work that’s been done on the philosophy of mathematics. Not platonism, not nominalism. None of it. Do you know what it looks like? It looks like this:

I think you think you know me, but you don’t. At all. I am aware of the massive collection of work done over time. Nobody can know all of it. Even the best of the best may know a hundredth of it. Such is the breadth of knowledge.

(1) Synthetic claims of existence should not be given great credence
without strong evidential support.
(2) Existence claims for mathematical abstracta, especially the Axiom of
Infnity, that there exists an infnite set or even plurality, are
synthetic.
(3) There is no good direct evidence for such existence claims. For
instance. contra early efforts of Maddy. we do not perceive sets. and.
in any case. not infnite sets. which classical analysis requires.
(4) The best indirect evidence comes via scientific indispensability argu-
ments. However. alternative programs such as predicativism.
Chihara’s semantic modal-nominalism, and my modal-structuralism
separately and cumulatively undercut such arguments. (For certain
portions of science. Field’s nominalistic constructions also undercut
them.)
(5) The fact that current science takes mathematics for granted is not
good evidence that premise (1) is suspended in the case of mathemat-
ics when viewed from a naturalistic-scientific standpoint.
The conclusion is. therefore.
(6) The evidence currently available for mathematical abstracta is quite
weak. and so we should not put much credence in a face-value.
platonist reading.

[…]

How can polyadic second-order quantification be introduced? One way–the
one I initially pursued in Mathematics without Numbers–is to resort to
brute force: since only conceptual possibilities matter. one can postulate
enough extraneous atoms to code ordered pairs of given individuals: relations
are then coded as wholes of pairs. But more recently. more general and elegant
methods were developed by Burgess and Lewis [I991], ingeniously
combining mereology with plural quantification. It needs to be assumed that
there are infitely many atoms (or individuals behaving enough like atoms).
but, for modal-structural mathematics it suffices to entertain this merely
hypothetically. Then (following Burgess’ construction) unordered pairs of
atoms (diatomic wholes) can code a 1-1 correspondence between all the atoms
and some of them, and some other diatoms can code a second l-l correspon-
dence between all the atoms and others entirely discrete from (not overlap-
ping) the first targets. (To insure this much. one must assume a kind of partition of all the atoms into three disjoint pieces, (a part of) each equinumerous with the remaining two. something which can be expressed with plural quantification and mereology.) Then one can make sense of the “first image”
of any given individual, i.e. the sum (fusion) of the images of its atoms
under the first 1-1 correspondence, and the “second image” of a given individual, the sum of the images of its atoms under the second 1-1 correspondence.
These images are always discrete from one another. The ordered pair of two,
possibly overlapping individuals is then defined as the sum of the first image
of the one to be first and the second image of the one to be second. Relations
are then available by quantifying plurally over ordered pairs. All this is
relative to a given trisection of the given infinitude of atoms, and it is
cumbersome to write it all out. But it works. The upshot is a nominalistic
reduction of arbitrary n-adic relations in the language of tenereology and
(monadic) plural quantification.

Hellman, Geoffrey. “On Nominalism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3):691-705 (2001)

Go look that up and read it and tell me that you

1. Understand what’s being said and

2. Can deny any of it.

You do that, I’ll buy you Metabolic Drive for rest of your life.

I anticipate the responses: “That’s not fair, you’re quoting esoteric jargon that only one or two members of this entire forum can understand.”

To which I reply, again, that it isn’t my fault that I’m debating someone who makes these laughable claims about entire philosophical schools which he says he knows to be bullshit…while not being able to differentiate between a valid and an invalid argument in propositional logic.

Edited[/quote]

Why are you being a jerk?
I take exception to premise 1 and I don’t believe premise 2 follows. Premise one deals with a demand for evidence for the synthetic a priori premise 2 takes evidence and says it’s not evidence?
As Kamui would say Kant wins again:

Analytic a posteriori judgments cannot arise, since there is never any need to appeal to experience in support of a purely explicative assertion.
Synthetic a posteriori judgments are the relatively uncontroversial matters of fact we come to know by means of our sensory experience (though Wolff had tried to derive even these from the principle of contradiction).
Analytic a priori judgments, everyone agrees, include all merely logical truths and straightforward matters of definition; they are necessarily true.
Synthetic a priori judgments are the crucial case, since only they could provide new information that is necessarily true. But neither Leibniz nor Hume considered the possibility of any such case.
Unlike his predecessors, Kant maintained that synthetic a priori judgments not only are possible but actually provide the basis for significant portions of human knowledge. In fact, he supposed (pace Hume) that arithmetic and geometry comprise such judgments and that natural science depends on them for its power to explain and predict events. What is more, metaphysics�¢??if it turns out to be possible at all�¢??must rest upon synthetic a priori judgments, since anything else would be either uninformative or unjustifiable. But how are synthetic a priori judgments possible at all? This is the central question Kant sought to answer.

synthetic a priori proposition, in logic, a proposition the predicate of which is not logically or analytically contained in the subject�¢??i.e., synthetic�¢??and the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience�¢??i.e., a priori. Thus the proposition �¢??Some bodies are heavy�¢?? is synthetic because the idea of heaviness is not necessarily contained in that of bodies. On the other hand, the proposition �¢??All husbands are male�¢?? is analytic because the idea of maleness is already contained in that of husband. In general the truth or falsity of synthetic statements is proved only by whether or not they conform to the way the world is and not by virtue of the meaning of the words they contain. Synthetic a priori knowledge is central to the thought of Immanuel Kant, who argued that some such a priori concepts are presupposed by the very possibility of experience.

What are you quoting without attribution here?[/quote]

the critique of pure reason

[pat]

[quote]smh_23 wrote:
By the way, the argument is explained at length. Read it if you are actually going to try to argue against this guy. Be sure to refute the explications, like the one I quoted after the argument. Just to refresh your memory on what they’re like:

[quote]
How can polyadic second-order quantification be introduced? One way–the
one I initially pursued in Mathematics without Numbers–is to resort to
brute force: since only conceptual possibilities matter. one can postulate
enough extraneous atoms to code ordered pairs of given individuals: relations
are then coded as wholes of pairs. But more recently. more general and elegant
methods were developed by Burgess and Lewis [I991], ingeniously
combining mereology with plural quantification. It needs to be assumed that
there are infitely many atoms (or individuals behaving enough like atoms).
but, for modal-structural mathematics it suffices to entertain this merely
hypothetically. Then (following Burgess’ construction) unordered pairs of
atoms (diatomic wholes) can code a 1-1 correspondence between all the atoms
and some of them, and some other diatoms can code a second l-l correspon-
dence between all the atoms and others entirely discrete from (not overlap-
ping) the first targets. (To insure this much. one must assume a kind of partition of all the atoms into three disjoint pieces, (a part of) each equinumerous with the remaining two. something which can be expressed with plural quantification and mereology.) Then one can make sense of the “first image”
of any given individual, i.e. the sum (fusion) of the images of its atoms
under the first 1-1 correspondence, and the “second image” of a given individual, the sum of the images of its atoms under the second 1-1 correspondence.
These images are always discrete from one another. The ordered pair of two,
possibly overlapping individuals is then defined as the sum of the first image
of the one to be first and the second image of the one to be second. Relations
are then available by quantifying plurally over ordered pairs. All this is
relative to a given trisection of the given infinitude of atoms, and it is
cumbersome to write it all out. But it works. The upshot is a nominalistic
reduction of arbitrary n-adic relations in the language of tenereology and
(monadic) plural quantification.
[/quote][/quote]

This is all greek to me. I am not sure how it supports the argument. Can you break it down into english for me? The version for dummies since you know what he is saying here?

[pat]

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

[quote]kamui wrote:
That’s pretty close :

Si les droits n’existaient pas, il faudrait les inventer.

But indeed, the fact is that we can’t invent them arbitrarily.

So, even if there is no “natural right”, the “invention of right” still has some structural rules.

This is enough to disprove a strictly positivist position.
And it makes the idea of “natural rights” pretty close to the truth in practice, if not exactly/technically/epistemologically true,[/quote]

In practice, without any external force guiding them, people would believe their rights are infinite, they are “allowed” (they would never think of using this term) to do whatever they want, nothing would ever restrict their actions except what is physically impossible.

Then as people interact and form cooperative relationships, conflicts arise. Person A takes an apple from person B. Person B feels “wronged” but doesn’t know what it means, but he still acts on it. Person B takes the apple back from Person A and Person A feels wronged. Now both people feel “wronged” but both have done the same wrong thing. At this point they may come to an agreement : don’t take my apple and i won’t take yours, or they might even form the general rule :no one can take anothers apples etc. realistically this situation would escalate in a revenge cycle until both people are trying to kill each other, and this would repeat over and over until people collectivly agreed not to steal

But the point is, everything seems to be a natural right at first, the only thing that is ever contructed is a restriction of rights[/quote]

I think if you start layering ‘wrongs’ I think you start to confuse the issue. It’s not that it’s not a proper ethical inquiry in itself. What we don’t want to confuse is what a natural right, being argued for and against is.
In this case it’s the right of a person to not be willfully wronged by another person. Does this right exist? [/quote]

I have quoted “wrong” because I have actually taken a step back from the dicotomy in this thought experiment.

I will think of a better way to explain all this. Until then consider this: Do animals wait for permission (a declaration of “rights”) to do what they must to survive? No. They just act.

Humans do the same thing. However, we can use higher logic, and we can recognize others as being just like us. When we come into conflict with each other, even without ANY existing social structure, it is possible for us to recognize a deadlock because of this. A is physically capable of Taking from B and vice versa. They could take the same thing from each other back and forth forever, but eventually reach an agreement: I will not take what is in your hand if you do not take what is in mine. It requires no reference to “rights” or a “social contract” for both parties to see the value in it.

What I’m saying is “rights” if they exist, can only ever be defined negatively, by placing a restriction on what others can do. The “rights” we have are nothing more than leftovers after restrictions have been placed.

[/quote]
I agree mostly. I don’t know that they can only be described negatively it certainly easier to do so. The ‘do no harm’ contingent of natural rights is the easiest way to talk about it.[/quote]

Right, and it is the most reliable way to truthfully speak about it without gray areas. A logical person would not agree to statements of rights such as “you may steal from me and I may steal from you” or “you may kill my family and I may kill your family”. We can accept these propositions without dispute from other rational people.

The positive statements of rights such as “humans have a right to freedom” or humans have a right to privacy" have many gray areas when they are analyzed which is why they are disputed.

Negatively defined “commandments” that basically fall under “do not harm others” can be considered logically necessary and this is satisfactory to most people.

I would not dispute that there are certain rights we should have that are positively defined, but logically demonstrating their necessity is not simple and not likely to be agreed upon.
[/quote]

Correct, so do you believe in the natural right of man to be free deliberate harm caused by another man?

[smh_23]

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

I would like to see the case that math is physical be made. Can you put together a case? Argument or prose I don’t care.[/quote]

Specific arguments–on both sides–have been made by people who spent their lives studying these things. Neither you nor I can understand them, and neither you nor I can refute them. What I am trying to do here is to get you to see that you know far less than you believe you know. “physicalism/Platonic idealism is not true” or “mathematics do/do not supervene on the physical” are, as claims, over-reaches by people who study these things for a living. Made by you and me, they are infinitely worse.[/quote]

So this is an ego thing? Your not asserting a position just contradicting mine to show me I don’t know a whole lot?[/quote]

No, this is not an ego thing. You made a series of claims to certainty which you cannot justify. That’s what this is.
[/quote]
What claims are these?

I have already gone through these exercises a long time ago. They are complex to explain the genesis of everyone though and to write lengthy proofs on why a proposition is true or false.[/quote]

Why do you say things like this? It’s beyond fatuous. I am very familiar with your grasp of logical reasoning. You can’t write or critique a fraction of a hundredth of the work that’s been done on the philosophy of mathematics. Not platonism, not nominalism. None of it. Do you know what it looks like? It looks like this:

I think you think you know me, but you don’t. At all. I am aware of the massive collection of work done over time. Nobody can know all of it. Even the best of the best may know a hundredth of it. Such is the breadth of knowledge.

(1) Synthetic claims of existence should not be given great credence
without strong evidential support.
(2) Existence claims for mathematical abstracta, especially the Axiom of
Infnity, that there exists an infnite set or even plurality, are
synthetic.
(3) There is no good direct evidence for such existence claims. For
instance. contra early efforts of Maddy. we do not perceive sets. and.
in any case. not infnite sets. which classical analysis requires.
(4) The best indirect evidence comes via scientific indispensability argu-
ments. However. alternative programs such as predicativism.
Chihara’s semantic modal-nominalism, and my modal-structuralism
separately and cumulatively undercut such arguments. (For certain
portions of science. Field’s nominalistic constructions also undercut
them.)
(5) The fact that current science takes mathematics for granted is not
good evidence that premise (1) is suspended in the case of mathemat-
ics when viewed from a naturalistic-scientific standpoint.
The conclusion is. therefore.
(6) The evidence currently available for mathematical abstracta is quite
weak. and so we should not put much credence in a face-value.
platonist reading.

[…]

How can polyadic second-order quantification be introduced? One way–the
one I initially pursued in Mathematics without Numbers–is to resort to
brute force: since only conceptual possibilities matter. one can postulate
enough extraneous atoms to code ordered pairs of given individuals: relations
are then coded as wholes of pairs. But more recently. more general and elegant
methods were developed by Burgess and Lewis [I991], ingeniously
combining mereology with plural quantification. It needs to be assumed that
there are infitely many atoms (or individuals behaving enough like atoms).
but, for modal-structural mathematics it suffices to entertain this merely
hypothetically. Then (following Burgess’ construction) unordered pairs of
atoms (diatomic wholes) can code a 1-1 correspondence between all the atoms
and some of them, and some other diatoms can code a second l-l correspon-
dence between all the atoms and others entirely discrete from (not overlap-
ping) the first targets. (To insure this much. one must assume a kind of partition of all the atoms into three disjoint pieces, (a part of) each equinumerous with the remaining two. something which can be expressed with plural quantification and mereology.) Then one can make sense of the “first image”
of any given individual, i.e. the sum (fusion) of the images of its atoms
under the first 1-1 correspondence, and the “second image” of a given individual, the sum of the images of its atoms under the second 1-1 correspondence.
These images are always discrete from one another. The ordered pair of two,
possibly overlapping individuals is then defined as the sum of the first image
of the one to be first and the second image of the one to be second. Relations
are then available by quantifying plurally over ordered pairs. All this is
relative to a given trisection of the given infinitude of atoms, and it is
cumbersome to write it all out. But it works. The upshot is a nominalistic
reduction of arbitrary n-adic relations in the language of tenereology and
(monadic) plural quantification.

Hellman, Geoffrey. “On Nominalism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3):691-705 (2001)

Go look that up and read it and tell me that you

1. Understand what’s being said and

2. Can deny any of it.

You do that, I’ll buy you Metabolic Drive for rest of your life.

I anticipate the responses: “That’s not fair, you’re quoting esoteric jargon that only one or two members of this entire forum can understand.”

To which I reply, again, that it isn’t my fault that I’m debating someone who makes these laughable claims about entire philosophical schools which he says he knows to be bullshit…while not being able to differentiate between a valid and an invalid argument in propositional logic.

Edited[/quote]

Why are you being a jerk?
I take exception to premise 1 and I don’t believe premise 2 follows. Premise one deals with a demand for evidence for the synthetic a priori premise 2 takes evidence and says it’s not evidence?
As Kamui would say Kant wins again:

Analytic a posteriori judgments cannot arise, since there is never any need to appeal to experience in support of a purely explicative assertion.
Synthetic a posteriori judgments are the relatively uncontroversial matters of fact we come to know by means of our sensory experience (though Wolff had tried to derive even these from the principle of contradiction).
Analytic a priori judgments, everyone agrees, include all merely logical truths and straightforward matters of definition; they are necessarily true.
Synthetic a priori judgments are the crucial case, since only they could provide new information that is necessarily true. But neither Leibniz nor Hume considered the possibility of any such case.
Unlike his predecessors, Kant maintained that synthetic a priori judgments not only are possible but actually provide the basis for significant portions of human knowledge. In fact, he supposed (pace Hume) that arithmetic and geometry comprise such judgments and that natural science depends on them for its power to explain and predict events. What is more, metaphysics�?�¢??if it turns out to be possible at all�?�¢??must rest upon synthetic a priori judgments, since anything else would be either uninformative or unjustifiable. But how are synthetic a priori judgments possible at all? This is the central question Kant sought to answer.

synthetic a priori proposition, in logic, a proposition the predicate of which is not logically or analytically contained in the subject�?�¢??i.e., synthetic�?�¢??and the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience�?�¢??i.e., a priori. Thus the proposition �?�¢??Some bodies are heavy�?�¢?? is synthetic because the idea of heaviness is not necessarily contained in that of bodies. On the other hand, the proposition �?�¢??All husbands are male�?�¢?? is analytic because the idea of maleness is already contained in that of husband. In general the truth or falsity of synthetic statements is proved only by whether or not they conform to the way the world is and not by virtue of the meaning of the words they contain. Synthetic a priori knowledge is central to the thought of Immanuel Kant, who argued that some such a priori concepts are presupposed by the very possibility of experience.

What are you quoting without attribution here?[/quote]

the critique of pure reason

No it isn’t.

[pat]

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

I would like to see the case that math is physical be made. Can you put together a case? Argument or prose I don’t care.[/quote]

Specific arguments–on both sides–have been made by people who spent their lives studying these things. Neither you nor I can understand them, and neither you nor I can refute them. What I am trying to do here is to get you to see that you know far less than you believe you know. “physicalism/Platonic idealism is not true” or “mathematics do/do not supervene on the physical” are, as claims, over-reaches by people who study these things for a living. Made by you and me, they are infinitely worse.[/quote]

So this is an ego thing? Your not asserting a position just contradicting mine to show me I don’t know a whole lot?[/quote]

No, this is not an ego thing. You made a series of claims to certainty which you cannot justify. That’s what this is.
[/quote]
What claims are these?

I have already gone through these exercises a long time ago. They are complex to explain the genesis of everyone though and to write lengthy proofs on why a proposition is true or false.[/quote]

Why do you say things like this? It’s beyond fatuous. I am very familiar with your grasp of logical reasoning. You can’t write or critique a fraction of a hundredth of the work that’s been done on the philosophy of mathematics. Not platonism, not nominalism. None of it. Do you know what it looks like? It looks like this:

I think you think you know me, but you don’t. At all. I am aware of the massive collection of work done over time. Nobody can know all of it. Even the best of the best may know a hundredth of it. Such is the breadth of knowledge.

(1) Synthetic claims of existence should not be given great credence
without strong evidential support.
(2) Existence claims for mathematical abstracta, especially the Axiom of
Infnity, that there exists an infnite set or even plurality, are
synthetic.
(3) There is no good direct evidence for such existence claims. For
instance. contra early efforts of Maddy. we do not perceive sets. and.
in any case. not infnite sets. which classical analysis requires.
(4) The best indirect evidence comes via scientific indispensability argu-
ments. However. alternative programs such as predicativism.
Chihara’s semantic modal-nominalism, and my modal-structuralism
separately and cumulatively undercut such arguments. (For certain
portions of science. Field’s nominalistic constructions also undercut
them.)
(5) The fact that current science takes mathematics for granted is not
good evidence that premise (1) is suspended in the case of mathemat-
ics when viewed from a naturalistic-scientific standpoint.
The conclusion is. therefore.
(6) The evidence currently available for mathematical abstracta is quite
weak. and so we should not put much credence in a face-value.
platonist reading.

[…]

How can polyadic second-order quantification be introduced? One way–the
one I initially pursued in Mathematics without Numbers–is to resort to
brute force: since only conceptual possibilities matter. one can postulate
enough extraneous atoms to code ordered pairs of given individuals: relations
are then coded as wholes of pairs. But more recently. more general and elegant
methods were developed by Burgess and Lewis [I991], ingeniously
combining mereology with plural quantification. It needs to be assumed that
there are infitely many atoms (or individuals behaving enough like atoms).
but, for modal-structural mathematics it suffices to entertain this merely
hypothetically. Then (following Burgess’ construction) unordered pairs of
atoms (diatomic wholes) can code a 1-1 correspondence between all the atoms
and some of them, and some other diatoms can code a second l-l correspon-
dence between all the atoms and others entirely discrete from (not overlap-
ping) the first targets. (To insure this much. one must assume a kind of partition of all the atoms into three disjoint pieces, (a part of) each equinumerous with the remaining two. something which can be expressed with plural quantification and mereology.) Then one can make sense of the “first image”
of any given individual, i.e. the sum (fusion) of the images of its atoms
under the first 1-1 correspondence, and the “second image” of a given individual, the sum of the images of its atoms under the second 1-1 correspondence.
These images are always discrete from one another. The ordered pair of two,
possibly overlapping individuals is then defined as the sum of the first image
of the one to be first and the second image of the one to be second. Relations
are then available by quantifying plurally over ordered pairs. All this is
relative to a given trisection of the given infinitude of atoms, and it is
cumbersome to write it all out. But it works. The upshot is a nominalistic
reduction of arbitrary n-adic relations in the language of tenereology and
(monadic) plural quantification.

Hellman, Geoffrey. “On Nominalism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3):691-705 (2001)

Go look that up and read it and tell me that you

1. Understand what’s being said and

2. Can deny any of it.

You do that, I’ll buy you Metabolic Drive for rest of your life.

I anticipate the responses: “That’s not fair, you’re quoting esoteric jargon that only one or two members of this entire forum can understand.”

To which I reply, again, that it isn’t my fault that I’m debating someone who makes these laughable claims about entire philosophical schools which he says he knows to be bullshit…while not being able to differentiate between a valid and an invalid argument in propositional logic.

Edited[/quote]

Why are you being a jerk?
I take exception to premise 1 and I don’t believe premise 2 follows. Premise one deals with a demand for evidence for the synthetic a priori premise 2 takes evidence and says it’s not evidence?
As Kamui would say Kant wins again:

Analytic a posteriori judgments cannot arise, since there is never any need to appeal to experience in support of a purely explicative assertion.
Synthetic a posteriori judgments are the relatively uncontroversial matters of fact we come to know by means of our sensory experience (though Wolff had tried to derive even these from the principle of contradiction).
Analytic a priori judgments, everyone agrees, include all merely logical truths and straightforward matters of definition; they are necessarily true.
Synthetic a priori judgments are the crucial case, since only they could provide new information that is necessarily true. But neither Leibniz nor Hume considered the possibility of any such case.
Unlike his predecessors, Kant maintained that synthetic a priori judgments not only are possible but actually provide the basis for significant portions of human knowledge. In fact, he supposed (pace Hume) that arithmetic and geometry comprise such judgments and that natural science depends on them for its power to explain and predict events. What is more, metaphysics�?�¢??if it turns out to be possible at all�?�¢??must rest upon synthetic a priori judgments, since anything else would be either uninformative or unjustifiable. But how are synthetic a priori judgments possible at all? This is the central question Kant sought to answer.

synthetic a priori proposition, in logic, a proposition the predicate of which is not logically or analytically contained in the subject�?�¢??i.e., synthetic�?�¢??and the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience�?�¢??i.e., a priori. Thus the proposition �?�¢??Some bodies are heavy�?�¢?? is synthetic because the idea of heaviness is not necessarily contained in that of bodies. On the other hand, the proposition �?�¢??All husbands are male�?�¢?? is analytic because the idea of maleness is already contained in that of husband. In general the truth or falsity of synthetic statements is proved only by whether or not they conform to the way the world is and not by virtue of the meaning of the words they contain. Synthetic a priori knowledge is central to the thought of Immanuel Kant, who argued that some such a priori concepts are presupposed by the very possibility of experience.

What are you quoting without attribution here?[/quote]

the critique of pure reason

You argue against Kant, you’re going to get Kant.
I hated the way he writes, but he was brilliant.
Synthetic a priori judgements demand strong, undefined evidence? ← I demand evidence that this statement is true.
There is a litany of evidence. It’s just a matter of what do you want to know…

[pat]

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

I would like to see the case that math is physical be made. Can you put together a case? Argument or prose I don’t care.[/quote]

Specific arguments–on both sides–have been made by people who spent their lives studying these things. Neither you nor I can understand them, and neither you nor I can refute them. What I am trying to do here is to get you to see that you know far less than you believe you know. “physicalism/Platonic idealism is not true” or “mathematics do/do not supervene on the physical” are, as claims, over-reaches by people who study these things for a living. Made by you and me, they are infinitely worse.[/quote]

So this is an ego thing? Your not asserting a position just contradicting mine to show me I don’t know a whole lot?[/quote]

No, this is not an ego thing. You made a series of claims to certainty which you cannot justify. That’s what this is.
[/quote]
What claims are these?

I have already gone through these exercises a long time ago. They are complex to explain the genesis of everyone though and to write lengthy proofs on why a proposition is true or false.[/quote]

Why do you say things like this? It’s beyond fatuous. I am very familiar with your grasp of logical reasoning. You can’t write or critique a fraction of a hundredth of the work that’s been done on the philosophy of mathematics. Not platonism, not nominalism. None of it. Do you know what it looks like? It looks like this:

I think you think you know me, but you don’t. At all. I am aware of the massive collection of work done over time. Nobody can know all of it. Even the best of the best may know a hundredth of it. Such is the breadth of knowledge.

(1) Synthetic claims of existence should not be given great credence
without strong evidential support.
(2) Existence claims for mathematical abstracta, especially the Axiom of
Infnity, that there exists an infnite set or even plurality, are
synthetic.
(3) There is no good direct evidence for such existence claims. For
instance. contra early efforts of Maddy. we do not perceive sets. and.
in any case. not infnite sets. which classical analysis requires.
(4) The best indirect evidence comes via scientific indispensability argu-
ments. However. alternative programs such as predicativism.
Chihara’s semantic modal-nominalism, and my modal-structuralism
separately and cumulatively undercut such arguments. (For certain
portions of science. Field’s nominalistic constructions also undercut
them.)
(5) The fact that current science takes mathematics for granted is not
good evidence that premise (1) is suspended in the case of mathemat-
ics when viewed from a naturalistic-scientific standpoint.
The conclusion is. therefore.
(6) The evidence currently available for mathematical abstracta is quite
weak. and so we should not put much credence in a face-value.
platonist reading.

[…]

How can polyadic second-order quantification be introduced? One way–the
one I initially pursued in Mathematics without Numbers–is to resort to
brute force: since only conceptual possibilities matter. one can postulate
enough extraneous atoms to code ordered pairs of given individuals: relations
are then coded as wholes of pairs. But more recently. more general and elegant
methods were developed by Burgess and Lewis [I991], ingeniously
combining mereology with plural quantification. It needs to be assumed that
there are infitely many atoms (or individuals behaving enough like atoms).
but, for modal-structural mathematics it suffices to entertain this merely
hypothetically. Then (following Burgess’ construction) unordered pairs of
atoms (diatomic wholes) can code a 1-1 correspondence between all the atoms
and some of them, and some other diatoms can code a second l-l correspon-
dence between all the atoms and others entirely discrete from (not overlap-
ping) the first targets. (To insure this much. one must assume a kind of partition of all the atoms into three disjoint pieces, (a part of) each equinumerous with the remaining two. something which can be expressed with plural quantification and mereology.) Then one can make sense of the “first image”
of any given individual, i.e. the sum (fusion) of the images of its atoms
under the first 1-1 correspondence, and the “second image” of a given individual, the sum of the images of its atoms under the second 1-1 correspondence.
These images are always discrete from one another. The ordered pair of two,
possibly overlapping individuals is then defined as the sum of the first image
of the one to be first and the second image of the one to be second. Relations
are then available by quantifying plurally over ordered pairs. All this is
relative to a given trisection of the given infinitude of atoms, and it is
cumbersome to write it all out. But it works. The upshot is a nominalistic
reduction of arbitrary n-adic relations in the language of tenereology and
(monadic) plural quantification.

Hellman, Geoffrey. “On Nominalism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3):691-705 (2001)

Go look that up and read it and tell me that you

1. Understand what’s being said and

2. Can deny any of it.

You do that, I’ll buy you Metabolic Drive for rest of your life.

I anticipate the responses: “That’s not fair, you’re quoting esoteric jargon that only one or two members of this entire forum can understand.”

To which I reply, again, that it isn’t my fault that I’m debating someone who makes these laughable claims about entire philosophical schools which he says he knows to be bullshit…while not being able to differentiate between a valid and an invalid argument in propositional logic.

Edited[/quote]

Why are you being a jerk?
I take exception to premise 1 and I don’t believe premise 2 follows. Premise one deals with a demand for evidence for the synthetic a priori premise 2 takes evidence and says it’s not evidence?
As Kamui would say Kant wins again:

Analytic a posteriori judgments cannot arise, since there is never any need to appeal to experience in support of a purely explicative assertion.
Synthetic a posteriori judgments are the relatively uncontroversial matters of fact we come to know by means of our sensory experience (though Wolff had tried to derive even these from the principle of contradiction).
Analytic a priori judgments, everyone agrees, include all merely logical truths and straightforward matters of definition; they are necessarily true.
Synthetic a priori judgments are the crucial case, since only they could provide new information that is necessarily true. But neither Leibniz nor Hume considered the possibility of any such case.
Unlike his predecessors, Kant maintained that synthetic a priori judgments not only are possible but actually provide the basis for significant portions of human knowledge. In fact, he supposed (pace Hume) that arithmetic and geometry comprise such judgments and that natural science depends on them for its power to explain and predict events. What is more, metaphysics�??�??�?�¢??if it turns out to be possible at all�??�??�?�¢??must rest upon synthetic a priori judgments, since anything else would be either uninformative or unjustifiable. But how are synthetic a priori judgments possible at all? This is the central question Kant sought to answer.

synthetic a priori proposition, in logic, a proposition the predicate of which is not logically or analytically contained in the subject�??�??�?�¢??i.e., synthetic�??�??�?�¢??and the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience�??�??�?�¢??i.e., a priori. Thus the proposition �??�??�?�¢??Some bodies are heavy�??�??�?�¢?? is synthetic because the idea of heaviness is not necessarily contained in that of bodies. On the other hand, the proposition �??�??�?�¢??All husbands are male�??�??�?�¢?? is analytic because the idea of maleness is already contained in that of husband. In general the truth or falsity of synthetic statements is proved only by whether or not they conform to the way the world is and not by virtue of the meaning of the words they contain. Synthetic a priori knowledge is central to the thought of Immanuel Kant, who argued that some such a priori concepts are presupposed by the very possibility of experience.

What are you quoting without attribution here?[/quote]

the critique of pure reason

No it isn’t.[/quote]

The first part is. The second is from the prolegomena of any future metaphysics.

[Facepalm_Death]

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

[quote]kamui wrote:
That’s pretty close :

Si les droits n’existaient pas, il faudrait les inventer.

But indeed, the fact is that we can’t invent them arbitrarily.

So, even if there is no “natural right”, the “invention of right” still has some structural rules.

This is enough to disprove a strictly positivist position.
And it makes the idea of “natural rights” pretty close to the truth in practice, if not exactly/technically/epistemologically true,[/quote]

In practice, without any external force guiding them, people would believe their rights are infinite, they are “allowed” (they would never think of using this term) to do whatever they want, nothing would ever restrict their actions except what is physically impossible.

Then as people interact and form cooperative relationships, conflicts arise. Person A takes an apple from person B. Person B feels “wronged” but doesn’t know what it means, but he still acts on it. Person B takes the apple back from Person A and Person A feels wronged. Now both people feel “wronged” but both have done the same wrong thing. At this point they may come to an agreement : don’t take my apple and i won’t take yours, or they might even form the general rule :no one can take anothers apples etc. realistically this situation would escalate in a revenge cycle until both people are trying to kill each other, and this would repeat over and over until people collectivly agreed not to steal

But the point is, everything seems to be a natural right at first, the only thing that is ever contructed is a restriction of rights[/quote]

I think if you start layering ‘wrongs’ I think you start to confuse the issue. It’s not that it’s not a proper ethical inquiry in itself. What we don’t want to confuse is what a natural right, being argued for and against is.
In this case it’s the right of a person to not be willfully wronged by another person. Does this right exist? [/quote]

I have quoted “wrong” because I have actually taken a step back from the dicotomy in this thought experiment.

I will think of a better way to explain all this. Until then consider this: Do animals wait for permission (a declaration of “rights”) to do what they must to survive? No. They just act.

Humans do the same thing. However, we can use higher logic, and we can recognize others as being just like us. When we come into conflict with each other, even without ANY existing social structure, it is possible for us to recognize a deadlock because of this. A is physically capable of Taking from B and vice versa. They could take the same thing from each other back and forth forever, but eventually reach an agreement: I will not take what is in your hand if you do not take what is in mine. It requires no reference to “rights” or a “social contract” for both parties to see the value in it.

What I’m saying is “rights” if they exist, can only ever be defined negatively, by placing a restriction on what others can do. The “rights” we have are nothing more than leftovers after restrictions have been placed.

[/quote]
I agree mostly. I don’t know that they can only be described negatively it certainly easier to do so. The ‘do no harm’ contingent of natural rights is the easiest way to talk about it.[/quote]

Right, and it is the most reliable way to truthfully speak about it without gray areas. A logical person would not agree to statements of rights such as “you may steal from me and I may steal from you” or “you may kill my family and I may kill your family”. We can accept these propositions without dispute from other rational people.

The positive statements of rights such as “humans have a right to freedom” or humans have a right to privacy" have many gray areas when they are analyzed which is why they are disputed.

Negatively defined “commandments” that basically fall under “do not harm others” can be considered logically necessary and this is satisfactory to most people.

I would not dispute that there are certain rights we should have that are positively defined, but logically demonstrating their necessity is not simple and not likely to be agreed upon.
[/quote]

Correct, so do you believe in the natural right of man to be free deliberate harm caused by another man?[/quote]

essentially yes.

but:

there is the well known dilemma of what if someone else violates this? Now if the right is stated only negatively (you don’t hurt me and I agree not to hurt you) then I may retaliate, I would not need to use lethal force, but I may injure him to stop his attack.

but if we both have this positively stated right to be free of deliberate harm, then I violate his rights in my defense just as much he violates my rights in his initial aggression

[Facepalm_Death]

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

I would like to see the case that math is physical be made. Can you put together a case? Argument or prose I don’t care.[/quote]

Specific arguments–on both sides–have been made by people who spent their lives studying these things. Neither you nor I can understand them, and neither you nor I can refute them. What I am trying to do here is to get you to see that you know far less than you believe you know. “physicalism/Platonic idealism is not true” or “mathematics do/do not supervene on the physical” are, as claims, over-reaches by people who study these things for a living. Made by you and me, they are infinitely worse.[/quote]

So this is an ego thing? Your not asserting a position just contradicting mine to show me I don’t know a whole lot?[/quote]

No, this is not an ego thing. You made a series of claims to certainty which you cannot justify. That’s what this is.
[/quote]
What claims are these?

I have already gone through these exercises a long time ago. They are complex to explain the genesis of everyone though and to write lengthy proofs on why a proposition is true or false.[/quote]

Why do you say things like this? It’s beyond fatuous. I am very familiar with your grasp of logical reasoning. You can’t write or critique a fraction of a hundredth of the work that’s been done on the philosophy of mathematics. Not platonism, not nominalism. None of it. Do you know what it looks like? It looks like this:

I think you think you know me, but you don’t. At all. I am aware of the massive collection of work done over time. Nobody can know all of it. Even the best of the best may know a hundredth of it. Such is the breadth of knowledge.

(1) Synthetic claims of existence should not be given great credence
without strong evidential support.
(2) Existence claims for mathematical abstracta, especially the Axiom of
Infnity, that there exists an infnite set or even plurality, are
synthetic.
(3) There is no good direct evidence for such existence claims. For
instance. contra early efforts of Maddy. we do not perceive sets. and.
in any case. not infnite sets. which classical analysis requires.
(4) The best indirect evidence comes via scientific indispensability argu-
ments. However. alternative programs such as predicativism.
Chihara’s semantic modal-nominalism, and my modal-structuralism
separately and cumulatively undercut such arguments. (For certain
portions of science. Field’s nominalistic constructions also undercut
them.)
(5) The fact that current science takes mathematics for granted is not
good evidence that premise (1) is suspended in the case of mathemat-
ics when viewed from a naturalistic-scientific standpoint.
The conclusion is. therefore.
(6) The evidence currently available for mathematical abstracta is quite
weak. and so we should not put much credence in a face-value.
platonist reading.

[…]

How can polyadic second-order quantification be introduced? One way–the
one I initially pursued in Mathematics without Numbers–is to resort to
brute force: since only conceptual possibilities matter. one can postulate
enough extraneous atoms to code ordered pairs of given individuals: relations
are then coded as wholes of pairs. But more recently. more general and elegant
methods were developed by Burgess and Lewis [I991], ingeniously
combining mereology with plural quantification. It needs to be assumed that
there are infitely many atoms (or individuals behaving enough like atoms).
but, for modal-structural mathematics it suffices to entertain this merely
hypothetically. Then (following Burgess’ construction) unordered pairs of
atoms (diatomic wholes) can code a 1-1 correspondence between all the atoms
and some of them, and some other diatoms can code a second l-l correspon-
dence between all the atoms and others entirely discrete from (not overlap-
ping) the first targets. (To insure this much. one must assume a kind of partition of all the atoms into three disjoint pieces, (a part of) each equinumerous with the remaining two. something which can be expressed with plural quantification and mereology.) Then one can make sense of the “first image”
of any given individual, i.e. the sum (fusion) of the images of its atoms
under the first 1-1 correspondence, and the “second image” of a given individual, the sum of the images of its atoms under the second 1-1 correspondence.
These images are always discrete from one another. The ordered pair of two,
possibly overlapping individuals is then defined as the sum of the first image
of the one to be first and the second image of the one to be second. Relations
are then available by quantifying plurally over ordered pairs. All this is
relative to a given trisection of the given infinitude of atoms, and it is
cumbersome to write it all out. But it works. The upshot is a nominalistic
reduction of arbitrary n-adic relations in the language of tenereology and
(monadic) plural quantification.

Hellman, Geoffrey. “On Nominalism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3):691-705 (2001)

Go look that up and read it and tell me that you

1. Understand what’s being said and

2. Can deny any of it.

You do that, I’ll buy you Metabolic Drive for rest of your life.

I anticipate the responses: “That’s not fair, you’re quoting esoteric jargon that only one or two members of this entire forum can understand.”

To which I reply, again, that it isn’t my fault that I’m debating someone who makes these laughable claims about entire philosophical schools which he says he knows to be bullshit…while not being able to differentiate between a valid and an invalid argument in propositional logic.

Edited[/quote]

Why are you being a jerk?
I take exception to premise 1 and I don’t believe premise 2 follows. Premise one deals with a demand for evidence for the synthetic a priori premise 2 takes evidence and says it’s not evidence?
As Kamui would say Kant wins again:

Analytic a posteriori judgments cannot arise, since there is never any need to appeal to experience in support of a purely explicative assertion.
Synthetic a posteriori judgments are the relatively uncontroversial matters of fact we come to know by means of our sensory experience (though Wolff had tried to derive even these from the principle of contradiction).
Analytic a priori judgments, everyone agrees, include all merely logical truths and straightforward matters of definition; they are necessarily true.
Synthetic a priori judgments are the crucial case, since only they could provide new information that is necessarily true. But neither Leibniz nor Hume considered the possibility of any such case.
Unlike his predecessors, Kant maintained that synthetic a priori judgments not only are possible but actually provide the basis for significant portions of human knowledge. In fact, he supposed (pace Hume) that arithmetic and geometry comprise such judgments and that natural science depends on them for its power to explain and predict events. What is more, metaphysics�??�?�¢??if it turns out to be possible at all�??�?�¢??must rest upon synthetic a priori judgments, since anything else would be either uninformative or unjustifiable. But how are synthetic a priori judgments possible at all? This is the central question Kant sought to answer.

synthetic a priori proposition, in logic, a proposition the predicate of which is not logically or analytically contained in the subject�??�?�¢??i.e., synthetic�??�?�¢??and the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience�??�?�¢??i.e., a priori. Thus the proposition �??�?�¢??Some bodies are heavy�??�?�¢?? is synthetic because the idea of heaviness is not necessarily contained in that of bodies. On the other hand, the proposition �??�?�¢??All husbands are male�??�?�¢?? is analytic because the idea of maleness is already contained in that of husband. In general the truth or falsity of synthetic statements is proved only by whether or not they conform to the way the world is and not by virtue of the meaning of the words they contain. Synthetic a priori knowledge is central to the thought of Immanuel Kant, who argued that some such a priori concepts are presupposed by the very possibility of experience.

What are you quoting without attribution here?[/quote]

the critique of pure reason

No it isn’t.[/quote]

its a paraphrase, not a quote

[smh_23]

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

I would like to see the case that math is physical be made. Can you put together a case? Argument or prose I don’t care.[/quote]

Specific arguments–on both sides–have been made by people who spent their lives studying these things. Neither you nor I can understand them, and neither you nor I can refute them. What I am trying to do here is to get you to see that you know far less than you believe you know. “physicalism/Platonic idealism is not true” or “mathematics do/do not supervene on the physical” are, as claims, over-reaches by people who study these things for a living. Made by you and me, they are infinitely worse.[/quote]

So this is an ego thing? Your not asserting a position just contradicting mine to show me I don’t know a whole lot?[/quote]

No, this is not an ego thing. You made a series of claims to certainty which you cannot justify. That’s what this is.
[/quote]
What claims are these?

I have already gone through these exercises a long time ago. They are complex to explain the genesis of everyone though and to write lengthy proofs on why a proposition is true or false.[/quote]

Why do you say things like this? It’s beyond fatuous. I am very familiar with your grasp of logical reasoning. You can’t write or critique a fraction of a hundredth of the work that’s been done on the philosophy of mathematics. Not platonism, not nominalism. None of it. Do you know what it looks like? It looks like this:

I think you think you know me, but you don’t. At all. I am aware of the massive collection of work done over time. Nobody can know all of it. Even the best of the best may know a hundredth of it. Such is the breadth of knowledge.

(1) Synthetic claims of existence should not be given great credence
without strong evidential support.
(2) Existence claims for mathematical abstracta, especially the Axiom of
Infnity, that there exists an infnite set or even plurality, are
synthetic.
(3) There is no good direct evidence for such existence claims. For
instance. contra early efforts of Maddy. we do not perceive sets. and.
in any case. not infnite sets. which classical analysis requires.
(4) The best indirect evidence comes via scientific indispensability argu-
ments. However. alternative programs such as predicativism.
Chihara’s semantic modal-nominalism, and my modal-structuralism
separately and cumulatively undercut such arguments. (For certain
portions of science. Field’s nominalistic constructions also undercut
them.)
(5) The fact that current science takes mathematics for granted is not
good evidence that premise (1) is suspended in the case of mathemat-
ics when viewed from a naturalistic-scientific standpoint.
The conclusion is. therefore.
(6) The evidence currently available for mathematical abstracta is quite
weak. and so we should not put much credence in a face-value.
platonist reading.

[…]

How can polyadic second-order quantification be introduced? One way–the
one I initially pursued in Mathematics without Numbers–is to resort to
brute force: since only conceptual possibilities matter. one can postulate
enough extraneous atoms to code ordered pairs of given individuals: relations
are then coded as wholes of pairs. But more recently. more general and elegant
methods were developed by Burgess and Lewis [I991], ingeniously
combining mereology with plural quantification. It needs to be assumed that
there are infitely many atoms (or individuals behaving enough like atoms).
but, for modal-structural mathematics it suffices to entertain this merely
hypothetically. Then (following Burgess’ construction) unordered pairs of
atoms (diatomic wholes) can code a 1-1 correspondence between all the atoms
and some of them, and some other diatoms can code a second l-l correspon-
dence between all the atoms and others entirely discrete from (not overlap-
ping) the first targets. (To insure this much. one must assume a kind of partition of all the atoms into three disjoint pieces, (a part of) each equinumerous with the remaining two. something which can be expressed with plural quantification and mereology.) Then one can make sense of the “first image”
of any given individual, i.e. the sum (fusion) of the images of its atoms
under the first 1-1 correspondence, and the “second image” of a given individual, the sum of the images of its atoms under the second 1-1 correspondence.
These images are always discrete from one another. The ordered pair of two,
possibly overlapping individuals is then defined as the sum of the first image
of the one to be first and the second image of the one to be second. Relations
are then available by quantifying plurally over ordered pairs. All this is
relative to a given trisection of the given infinitude of atoms, and it is
cumbersome to write it all out. But it works. The upshot is a nominalistic
reduction of arbitrary n-adic relations in the language of tenereology and
(monadic) plural quantification.

Hellman, Geoffrey. “On Nominalism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3):691-705 (2001)

Go look that up and read it and tell me that you

1. Understand what’s being said and

2. Can deny any of it.

You do that, I’ll buy you Metabolic Drive for rest of your life.

I anticipate the responses: “That’s not fair, you’re quoting esoteric jargon that only one or two members of this entire forum can understand.”

To which I reply, again, that it isn’t my fault that I’m debating someone who makes these laughable claims about entire philosophical schools which he says he knows to be bullshit…while not being able to differentiate between a valid and an invalid argument in propositional logic.

Edited[/quote]

Why are you being a jerk?
I take exception to premise 1 and I don’t believe premise 2 follows. Premise one deals with a demand for evidence for the synthetic a priori premise 2 takes evidence and says it’s not evidence?
As Kamui would say Kant wins again:

Analytic a posteriori judgments cannot arise, since there is never any need to appeal to experience in support of a purely explicative assertion.
Synthetic a posteriori judgments are the relatively uncontroversial matters of fact we come to know by means of our sensory experience (though Wolff had tried to derive even these from the principle of contradiction).
Analytic a priori judgments, everyone agrees, include all merely logical truths and straightforward matters of definition; they are necessarily true.
Synthetic a priori judgments are the crucial case, since only they could provide new information that is necessarily true. But neither Leibniz nor Hume considered the possibility of any such case.
Unlike his predecessors, Kant maintained that synthetic a priori judgments not only are possible but actually provide the basis for significant portions of human knowledge. In fact, he supposed (pace Hume) that arithmetic and geometry comprise such judgments and that natural science depends on them for its power to explain and predict events. What is more, metaphysics�??�??�??�??�?�¢??if it turns out to be possible at all�??�??�??�??�?�¢??must rest upon synthetic a priori judgments, since anything else would be either uninformative or unjustifiable. But how are synthetic a priori judgments possible at all? This is the central question Kant sought to answer.

synthetic a priori proposition, in logic, a proposition the predicate of which is not logically or analytically contained in the subject�??�??�??�??�?�¢??i.e., synthetic�??�??�??�??�?�¢??and the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience�??�??�??�??�?�¢??i.e., a priori. Thus the proposition �??�??�??�??�?�¢??Some bodies are heavy�??�??�??�??�?�¢?? is synthetic because the idea of heaviness is not necessarily contained in that of bodies. On the other hand, the proposition �??�??�??�??�?�¢??All husbands are male�??�??�??�??�?�¢?? is analytic because the idea of maleness is already contained in that of husband. In general the truth or falsity of synthetic statements is proved only by whether or not they conform to the way the world is and not by virtue of the meaning of the words they contain. Synthetic a priori knowledge is central to the thought of Immanuel Kant, who argued that some such a priori concepts are presupposed by the very possibility of experience.

What are you quoting without attribution here?[/quote]

the critique of pure reason

No it isn’t.[/quote]

The first part is. The second is from the prolegomena of any future metaphysics.[/quote]

No, Kant wrote either none are almost none of those words. How can you not know this?

As far as I can tell, you lifted a write-up–not Kant’s words–from the web page of a “professor” at an online university. Careful, keep that kind of thing up and somebody might suggest you run for a Senate seat. I hear Montana is nice.

[Facepalm_Death]

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

I would like to see the case that math is physical be made. Can you put together a case? Argument or prose I don’t care.[/quote]

Specific arguments–on both sides–have been made by people who spent their lives studying these things. Neither you nor I can understand them, and neither you nor I can refute them. What I am trying to do here is to get you to see that you know far less than you believe you know. “physicalism/Platonic idealism is not true” or “mathematics do/do not supervene on the physical” are, as claims, over-reaches by people who study these things for a living. Made by you and me, they are infinitely worse.[/quote]

So this is an ego thing? Your not asserting a position just contradicting mine to show me I don’t know a whole lot?[/quote]

No, this is not an ego thing. You made a series of claims to certainty which you cannot justify. That’s what this is.
[/quote]
What claims are these?

I have already gone through these exercises a long time ago. They are complex to explain the genesis of everyone though and to write lengthy proofs on why a proposition is true or false.[/quote]

Why do you say things like this? It’s beyond fatuous. I am very familiar with your grasp of logical reasoning. You can’t write or critique a fraction of a hundredth of the work that’s been done on the philosophy of mathematics. Not platonism, not nominalism. None of it. Do you know what it looks like? It looks like this:

I think you think you know me, but you don’t. At all. I am aware of the massive collection of work done over time. Nobody can know all of it. Even the best of the best may know a hundredth of it. Such is the breadth of knowledge.

(1) Synthetic claims of existence should not be given great credence
without strong evidential support.
(2) Existence claims for mathematical abstracta, especially the Axiom of
Infnity, that there exists an infnite set or even plurality, are
synthetic.
(3) There is no good direct evidence for such existence claims. For
instance. contra early efforts of Maddy. we do not perceive sets. and.
in any case. not infnite sets. which classical analysis requires.
(4) The best indirect evidence comes via scientific indispensability argu-
ments. However. alternative programs such as predicativism.
Chihara’s semantic modal-nominalism, and my modal-structuralism
separately and cumulatively undercut such arguments. (For certain
portions of science. Field’s nominalistic constructions also undercut
them.)
(5) The fact that current science takes mathematics for granted is not
good evidence that premise (1) is suspended in the case of mathemat-
ics when viewed from a naturalistic-scientific standpoint.
The conclusion is. therefore.
(6) The evidence currently available for mathematical abstracta is quite
weak. and so we should not put much credence in a face-value.
platonist reading.

[…]

How can polyadic second-order quantification be introduced? One way–the
one I initially pursued in Mathematics without Numbers–is to resort to
brute force: since only conceptual possibilities matter. one can postulate
enough extraneous atoms to code ordered pairs of given individuals: relations
are then coded as wholes of pairs. But more recently. more general and elegant
methods were developed by Burgess and Lewis [I991], ingeniously
combining mereology with plural quantification. It needs to be assumed that
there are infitely many atoms (or individuals behaving enough like atoms).
but, for modal-structural mathematics it suffices to entertain this merely
hypothetically. Then (following Burgess’ construction) unordered pairs of
atoms (diatomic wholes) can code a 1-1 correspondence between all the atoms
and some of them, and some other diatoms can code a second l-l correspon-
dence between all the atoms and others entirely discrete from (not overlap-
ping) the first targets. (To insure this much. one must assume a kind of partition of all the atoms into three disjoint pieces, (a part of) each equinumerous with the remaining two. something which can be expressed with plural quantification and mereology.) Then one can make sense of the “first image”
of any given individual, i.e. the sum (fusion) of the images of its atoms
under the first 1-1 correspondence, and the “second image” of a given individual, the sum of the images of its atoms under the second 1-1 correspondence.
These images are always discrete from one another. The ordered pair of two,
possibly overlapping individuals is then defined as the sum of the first image
of the one to be first and the second image of the one to be second. Relations
are then available by quantifying plurally over ordered pairs. All this is
relative to a given trisection of the given infinitude of atoms, and it is
cumbersome to write it all out. But it works. The upshot is a nominalistic
reduction of arbitrary n-adic relations in the language of tenereology and
(monadic) plural quantification.

Hellman, Geoffrey. “On Nominalism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3):691-705 (2001)

Go look that up and read it and tell me that you

1. Understand what’s being said and

2. Can deny any of it.

You do that, I’ll buy you Metabolic Drive for rest of your life.

I anticipate the responses: “That’s not fair, you’re quoting esoteric jargon that only one or two members of this entire forum can understand.”

To which I reply, again, that it isn’t my fault that I’m debating someone who makes these laughable claims about entire philosophical schools which he says he knows to be bullshit…while not being able to differentiate between a valid and an invalid argument in propositional logic.

Edited[/quote]

Why are you being a jerk?
I take exception to premise 1 and I don’t believe premise 2 follows. Premise one deals with a demand for evidence for the synthetic a priori premise 2 takes evidence and says it’s not evidence?
As Kamui would say Kant wins again:

Analytic a posteriori judgments cannot arise, since there is never any need to appeal to experience in support of a purely explicative assertion.
Synthetic a posteriori judgments are the relatively uncontroversial matters of fact we come to know by means of our sensory experience (though Wolff had tried to derive even these from the principle of contradiction).
Analytic a priori judgments, everyone agrees, include all merely logical truths and straightforward matters of definition; they are necessarily true.
Synthetic a priori judgments are the crucial case, since only they could provide new information that is necessarily true. But neither Leibniz nor Hume considered the possibility of any such case.
Unlike his predecessors, Kant maintained that synthetic a priori judgments not only are possible but actually provide the basis for significant portions of human knowledge. In fact, he supposed (pace Hume) that arithmetic and geometry comprise such judgments and that natural science depends on them for its power to explain and predict events. What is more, metaphysics�??�??�??�?�¢??if it turns out to be possible at all�??�??�??�?�¢??must rest upon synthetic a priori judgments, since anything else would be either uninformative or unjustifiable. But how are synthetic a priori judgments possible at all? This is the central question Kant sought to answer.

synthetic a priori proposition, in logic, a proposition the predicate of which is not logically or analytically contained in the subject�??�??�??�?�¢??i.e., synthetic�??�??�??�?�¢??and the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience�??�??�??�?�¢??i.e., a priori. Thus the proposition �??�??�??�?�¢??Some bodies are heavy�??�??�??�?�¢?? is synthetic because the idea of heaviness is not necessarily contained in that of bodies. On the other hand, the proposition �??�??�??�?�¢??All husbands are male�??�??�??�?�¢?? is analytic because the idea of maleness is already contained in that of husband. In general the truth or falsity of synthetic statements is proved only by whether or not they conform to the way the world is and not by virtue of the meaning of the words they contain. Synthetic a priori knowledge is central to the thought of Immanuel Kant, who argued that some such a priori concepts are presupposed by the very possibility of experience.

What are you quoting without attribution here?[/quote]

the critique of pure reason

No it isn’t.[/quote]

The first part is. The second is from the prolegomena of any future metaphysics.[/quote]

lets face it though, all his main points were already made in the Critique. The prolegomena was just his summary of his own work, with some different examples. I doubt he would have even written it if the Critique had been widely understood when it was first published

[smh_23]

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

its a paraphrase, not a quote[/quote]

No, it’s a direct quotation of someone else’s paraphrase.

[Facepalm_Death]

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

its a paraphrase, not a quote[/quote]

No, it’s a direct quotation of someone else’s paraphrase.[/quote]

clearly, but as near as I can tell the quote was already attributed to Kamui, IIRC he used this summary before

[kamui]

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

its a paraphrase, not a quote[/quote]

No, it’s a direct quotation of someone else’s paraphrase.[/quote]

clearly, but as near as I can tell the quote was already attributed to Kamui, IIRC he used this summary before
[/quote]

Lol. I never wrote that much on this board. And certainly not like that.

FYI the only part of this post that can be attributed to me is “Kant wins [again]”.
I said that, as a joke, in an old thread.

[smh_23]

[quote]pat wrote:

You argue against Kant, you’re going to get Kant.
I hated the way he writes, but he was brilliant.
Synthetic a priori judgements demand strong, undefined evidence? ← I demand evidence that this statement is true.
There is a litany of evidence. It’s just a matter of what do you want to know…
[/quote]

Again, if you are going to try to refute a professional philosopher’s argument on a topic that you don’t halfway understand, the bare minimum required of you is that you read the argument in full. (It’s telling that you don’t seem to realize this.) Then you’ll at least have a full picture…that you’re years’ worth of study away from being able to grasp, let alone deny.

No vague, inapt “there is a litany of evidence” line (you don’t even know what kind of evidence you’d be looking for, and you certainly don’t know how to find and present it) is going to allow you to escape from the problem you’ve created for yourself here. You spoke with certainty on an issue you had not investigated – (do you realize that there are dozens more nominalist arguments I can offer up? Do you think anybody thinks you’ve read them, let alone are able to refute them? I’ll save you the mystery and tell you: Nobody does, and rightly so) – and this is the cardinal sin of argumentation.

Worse, you’ve now been confronted with your inability to justify the silly, ignorance-born certainty you insist on tossing around like a shit-flinging monkey at the Bronx Zoo…and you’re insisting on clinging to it.

In other words, this discussion has taken a turn toward cheap parody. You go ahead and tell anybody who will listen that you “don’t believe premise 2 follows” from premise 1, which is a declaration of your nearly appalling, fundamental ignorance of logical argumentation’s most basic workings…and nothing more. (Do you actually expect to grasp, much less grapple with, a professional philosopher’s advanced, peer-reviewed, published work when you don’t understand Logic 101, bare-bones, introductory, day-one-of-the-semester material like how premises and conclusions work, or what ‘follows’ means?) You go ahead and do that. I won’t be participating, however.

Edited

[pat]

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

I would like to see the case that math is physical be made. Can you put together a case? Argument or prose I don’t care.[/quote]

Specific arguments–on both sides–have been made by people who spent their lives studying these things. Neither you nor I can understand them, and neither you nor I can refute them. What I am trying to do here is to get you to see that you know far less than you believe you know. “physicalism/Platonic idealism is not true” or “mathematics do/do not supervene on the physical” are, as claims, over-reaches by people who study these things for a living. Made by you and me, they are infinitely worse.[/quote]

So this is an ego thing? Your not asserting a position just contradicting mine to show me I don’t know a whole lot?[/quote]

No, this is not an ego thing. You made a series of claims to certainty which you cannot justify. That’s what this is.
[/quote]
What claims are these?

I have already gone through these exercises a long time ago. They are complex to explain the genesis of everyone though and to write lengthy proofs on why a proposition is true or false.[/quote]

Why do you say things like this? It’s beyond fatuous. I am very familiar with your grasp of logical reasoning. You can’t write or critique a fraction of a hundredth of the work that’s been done on the philosophy of mathematics. Not platonism, not nominalism. None of it. Do you know what it looks like? It looks like this:

I think you think you know me, but you don’t. At all. I am aware of the massive collection of work done over time. Nobody can know all of it. Even the best of the best may know a hundredth of it. Such is the breadth of knowledge.

(1) Synthetic claims of existence should not be given great credence
without strong evidential support.
(2) Existence claims for mathematical abstracta, especially the Axiom of
Infnity, that there exists an infnite set or even plurality, are
synthetic.
(3) There is no good direct evidence for such existence claims. For
instance. contra early efforts of Maddy. we do not perceive sets. and.
in any case. not infnite sets. which classical analysis requires.
(4) The best indirect evidence comes via scientific indispensability argu-
ments. However. alternative programs such as predicativism.
Chihara’s semantic modal-nominalism, and my modal-structuralism
separately and cumulatively undercut such arguments. (For certain
portions of science. Field’s nominalistic constructions also undercut
them.)
(5) The fact that current science takes mathematics for granted is not
good evidence that premise (1) is suspended in the case of mathemat-
ics when viewed from a naturalistic-scientific standpoint.
The conclusion is. therefore.
(6) The evidence currently available for mathematical abstracta is quite
weak. and so we should not put much credence in a face-value.
platonist reading.

[…]

How can polyadic second-order quantification be introduced? One way–the
one I initially pursued in Mathematics without Numbers–is to resort to
brute force: since only conceptual possibilities matter. one can postulate
enough extraneous atoms to code ordered pairs of given individuals: relations
are then coded as wholes of pairs. But more recently. more general and elegant
methods were developed by Burgess and Lewis [I991], ingeniously
combining mereology with plural quantification. It needs to be assumed that
there are infitely many atoms (or individuals behaving enough like atoms).
but, for modal-structural mathematics it suffices to entertain this merely
hypothetically. Then (following Burgess’ construction) unordered pairs of
atoms (diatomic wholes) can code a 1-1 correspondence between all the atoms
and some of them, and some other diatoms can code a second l-l correspon-
dence between all the atoms and others entirely discrete from (not overlap-
ping) the first targets. (To insure this much. one must assume a kind of partition of all the atoms into three disjoint pieces, (a part of) each equinumerous with the remaining two. something which can be expressed with plural quantification and mereology.) Then one can make sense of the “first image”
of any given individual, i.e. the sum (fusion) of the images of its atoms
under the first 1-1 correspondence, and the “second image” of a given individual, the sum of the images of its atoms under the second 1-1 correspondence.
These images are always discrete from one another. The ordered pair of two,
possibly overlapping individuals is then defined as the sum of the first image
of the one to be first and the second image of the one to be second. Relations
are then available by quantifying plurally over ordered pairs. All this is
relative to a given trisection of the given infinitude of atoms, and it is
cumbersome to write it all out. But it works. The upshot is a nominalistic
reduction of arbitrary n-adic relations in the language of tenereology and
(monadic) plural quantification.

Hellman, Geoffrey. “On Nominalism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3):691-705 (2001)

Go look that up and read it and tell me that you

1. Understand what’s being said and

2. Can deny any of it.

You do that, I’ll buy you Metabolic Drive for rest of your life.

I anticipate the responses: “That’s not fair, you’re quoting esoteric jargon that only one or two members of this entire forum can understand.”

To which I reply, again, that it isn’t my fault that I’m debating someone who makes these laughable claims about entire philosophical schools which he says he knows to be bullshit…while not being able to differentiate between a valid and an invalid argument in propositional logic.

Edited[/quote]

Why are you being a jerk?
I take exception to premise 1 and I don’t believe premise 2 follows. Premise one deals with a demand for evidence for the synthetic a priori premise 2 takes evidence and says it’s not evidence?
As Kamui would say Kant wins again:

Analytic a posteriori judgments cannot arise, since there is never any need to appeal to experience in support of a purely explicative assertion.
Synthetic a posteriori judgments are the relatively uncontroversial matters of fact we come to know by means of our sensory experience (though Wolff had tried to derive even these from the principle of contradiction).
Analytic a priori judgments, everyone agrees, include all merely logical truths and straightforward matters of definition; they are necessarily true.
Synthetic a priori judgments are the crucial case, since only they could provide new information that is necessarily true. But neither Leibniz nor Hume considered the possibility of any such case.
Unlike his predecessors, Kant maintained that synthetic a priori judgments not only are possible but actually provide the basis for significant portions of human knowledge. In fact, he supposed (pace Hume) that arithmetic and geometry comprise such judgments and that natural science depends on them for its power to explain and predict events. What is more, metaphysics�??�??�??�??�??�?�¢??if it turns out to be possible at all�??�??�??�??�??�?�¢??must rest upon synthetic a priori judgments, since anything else would be either uninformative or unjustifiable. But how are synthetic a priori judgments possible at all? This is the central question Kant sought to answer.

synthetic a priori proposition, in logic, a proposition the predicate of which is not logically or analytically contained in the subject�??�??�??�??�??�?�¢??i.e., synthetic�??�??�??�??�??�?�¢??and the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience�??�??�??�??�??�?�¢??i.e., a priori. Thus the proposition �??�??�??�??�??�?�¢??Some bodies are heavy�??�??�??�??�??�?�¢?? is synthetic because the idea of heaviness is not necessarily contained in that of bodies. On the other hand, the proposition �??�??�??�??�??�?�¢??All husbands are male�??�??�??�??�??�?�¢?? is analytic because the idea of maleness is already contained in that of husband. In general the truth or falsity of synthetic statements is proved only by whether or not they conform to the way the world is and not by virtue of the meaning of the words they contain. Synthetic a priori knowledge is central to the thought of Immanuel Kant, who argued that some such a priori concepts are presupposed by the very possibility of experience.

What are you quoting without attribution here?[/quote]

the critique of pure reason

No it isn’t.[/quote]

The first part is. The second is from the prolegomena of any future metaphysics.[/quote]

No, Kant wrote either none are almost none of those words. How can you not know this?

As far as I can tell, you lifted a write-up–not Kant’s words–from the web page of a “professor” at an online university. Careful, keep that kind of thing up and somebody might suggest you run for a Senate seat. I hear Montana is nice.[/quote]

No Kant didn’t write these words directly. These were digests of his work.