gabeygoat
Master Poster
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Does anything exist?
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I think what you are describing is "Confirmation Bias", and we are all susceptible to that, all day long. It's certainly something all of us have to be constantly on guard against. And that's one of the reasons why science has a properly rigorous process of peer review.
But in the case of politicians, I think it's more of a case of outright lying and deceptions, plus a huge dose of self-interest. But that's also why we have opposition parties, and opposing discussion and voting in the decision making chambers … there's also the final step of law and the courts, which has often stopped governments from pushing through with really damaging policies.
Ulf Nereng
Muse
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Under my avatar, I conveniently indicate my location as USA, yes.
Um...I'm not talking about what degrees a politician might have. Or degrees at all. Or politicians, for that matter. I'm talking about anyone who has a personal political philosophy, as most of us do. You can have a personal philosophy without a freaking degree in it, or a degree in anything for that matter.
Wait...you do agree with that, don't you?
No, I meant what I said. Sport Boxing on the TV has virtually nothing to do with a personal philosophy of self defense.
Disagreed. While they might not use the word, they likely have very complex and sophisticated philosophies regarding their sport, training and bout strategies.
But again, the professional sport boxing industry has pretty much nothing to do with an individual's philosophy of self defense.
Try the pursuits I actually referred to, and see if you come up with the same answer.
eta: I note under your screen name, you identify as a philosopher. Checkmate
OK, so we are back to "all constructive thought is philosophy" ... brilliant, so my cat does philosophy all day long ... so do all the birds in my garden. Dinosaurs used to do the same before they eventually (slowly!) died out 66 million years ago.
Oh, and a PhD is a doctorate in/of “philosophy too” (only an ancient antiquated naming tradition though, afaik).
Belz...
Fiend God
Amazing. You read it twice, highlighted it, and still managed to not understand it. Seven words and you managed to miss at least one.
How about you tell me what you mean by "philosophy". If you're ignoring the actual definition, at least tell me the one you're using.
My evidence is that your own quote calls it philosopic. Can't be anti-philosophy when you're doing philosophy. Also, it would be entirely risible to call me, of all people, anti-intellectual, and you know it. You just don't like the criticism.
Belz...
Fiend God
I can't let this one slide, Ian. Birds are dinosaurs.
Belz...
Fiend God
eta: I note under your screen name, you identify as a philosopher. Checkmate
Please tell me that was a joke.
You have a "personal political philosophy"? ... how is that different from anyone having views and opinions about politics? Or anyone taking a deep interest, or even a very active interest, in local, national or worldwide politics?
On your basis, presumably anyone might also have a historical view of politics ... or a geographical view ... and economics view ... or a sports view ... or architectural view ... or palaeontological view (all politicians are dinosaurs, and then a thousand spin-off's from that as plays-upon-words etc etc.).
Because it has the word "philosophy" in it so Thermal thinks he's trapped us in a "gotcha," the only level of argumentatives he is capable of.
From the beginning the only real argument the Philosophy Fanclub has had is screeching "But you're doing philosophy! But that thing you're doing, it's a type of philosophy!" over and over.
It's really difficult to see what you mean with "rules of logic" here. There are hundreds of different logics with rules that are incompatible with each other. Obviously you can't mean that all of them are innate to the existence. In my experience when people speak of "logic" as a huge monolith, they actually mean the classical first-order predicate logic or one of its subsets (either propositional logic or predicate logic without function symbols if we are lucky or Aristotelean syllogisms if we aren't). You might mean something else, but I'm going to proceed with that assumption.
The reason why there are hundreds of different logics is that classical logic is about as useful describing how humans actually reason as Aristotelean physics are for computing ballistic trajectories. No one uses pure classical logic to reason about anything outside of creating mathematical proofs. The main problem is that it simply isn't possible to express most everyday concepts with classical logic in a usable way. For example, you can't define the concept 'usually' with classical logic nor can you define 'yellow'.
All two-valued logics are particularly bad at handling concepts that are inherently fuzzy, like the color 'yellow'.
If you open an image editing software and make a gradient going from 100% saturation pure yellow to 0% saturation, it's clear that the 100% end is yellow and just as clear that the 0% end is not. But there is no single clear point where the color changes from 'yellow' to 'not yellow'. There's a transition zone and the location of the zone depends on the color and brightness settings of the monitor and ambient lighting of the room.
Within the zone it's not possible to say that if a given pixel is yellow or not. One way to express that is: '(yellow is false) and (not yellow is false)' (using the actual syntax of the logic in question, of course).
Yes. This is a contradiction in classical logic. But like I said, you can't use classical logic to reason about colors in a usable way (*). If you try to force the colors to binary values, you need to choose an arbitrary point within the transition zone and say: "This is where yellow starts. Everything left to this is yellow and everything right is not yellow". The problem is that the two sides of the line are visually identical and you if you show people samples taken from both sides of the line, they can't identify which of them are yellow better than random chance. And if you move the samples to a different room with different lighting, then suddenly the both can look clearly yellow or clearly not yellow.
One really important thing to remember about logic is that a modern logic is essentially an abstract system of symbol manipulation. You have strings of symbols and rules to manipulate them to get new strings of symbols. It is not the reality. You can assign meanings to your symbols saying that: "this symbol A represent this single particular thing about reality" but whenever you prove anything, you prove things only about the logical structure you created. If you did your formalization correctly, the results that you get correspond also to things that happen in reality. However, the reality is under no obligation to conform with your results. If you formalize things incorrectly, you get garbage out. You can never formalize every aspect of a real-world problem but you have to abstract things away and then hope that you didn't cut out anything important.
(*) The fuzzy transition zone is not the only problem that you encounter if you try to model colors with classical logic.
This must be some new definition of "logic" that I was previously unaware of.
And no I don't care if "Well such and philosophy considers this or that a valid form of logic..."
The Man
Unbanned zombie poster
Of course it can be discussed philosophically and I gave you the name of the philosophical position that does not hold that axiom as true.
First, if things can’t contradict themselves in reality then self-contradiction can only be a conceptual or philosophical construct. So then any discussion of self-contradiction would have to be a conceptual or philosophical one.
Second, as an axiom it can’t be proven as true or false within a system it governs. So weather or not to hold it as true or false can only be a philosophical determination.
Finally, lomiller already mentioned a superposition of opposing quantum states. However, photons, the neutral pion and gluons are their own anti-particle, it’s just a matter of phase. Similarly unwanted sound can be used to cancel itself by reflecting it 180 degrees out of phase.
"Axioms" sound a lot like "definitions with pretensions" from where I'm sitting.
A=A and "A thing can't be true and false at the same time" aren't some grand "philosophical" thoughts that some "Ultimate form of thinking that's better than all other forms of thinking" gets to take create for.
A=A and "A thing can't be true and false at the same time" aren't some grand "philosophical" thoughts that some "Ultimate form of thinking that's better than all other forms of thinking" gets to take create for.
The Man
Unbanned zombie poster
Under gauge theory I'd have to say yes. In that, the weak nuclear force is mediated by the intermediate vector boson, a gauge boson (W and Z particles).
Glad I could help you. Here are two examples of different logics that people actually use in practice:
* If you want to verify that your new communication protocol works correctly, you should use either LTL or CTL*, depending on what exactly you want to validate.
* If you want to program your computer using logic, you can use, for example, Prolog or Datalog (Prolog's semantics are quite close but not exactly the same as classical predicate logic's but the Datalog semantics are different).
To be frank, most logics that are useful do not originate from the philosophy department but from either mathematics or computer science ones.
Mathematically, a logic consists of two parts: syntax and semantics. The syntax defines what are syntactically valid formulas in the logic. For example: "for all x . P(x) implies Q(x)" is syntactically valid classical formula but "forall x P(not x)" is not. Most modern logics extend the syntax of classical logic by adding new operators to the syntax. For example, the LTL that I mentioned before adds operators:
* G - intuitive meaning "always"
* F - intuitive meaning "finally"
* R - intuitive meaning "something is true until a condition is met"
(and a few others that can be implemented using terms of those operators)
For example, "aRb" means that a is true up to some point in the future when b becomes true and b is true from that on.
The semantics then define how we assign truth values to the formulas and how truth values are propagated and what logical consequence means in the logic.
Basically, the semantics of a logic is defined over some class of mathematical structures. For classical predicate logic we use relational structures over some universe. A classical formula is valid if it is true in all possible structures and unsatisfiable if there is no structure where it is true.
When you use predicate logic to solve some practical problem, you first formalize the rules of the problem into formulas, then define the structure of the problem, and finally evaluate the formulas with respect to the structure to find your answer.
Modal logics (like the LTL and CTL*) generally define their semantics using Kripke structures. There the idea is that there is a set of worlds and each world is a classical structure. There is also an accessibility relation that tells how we can move between the worlds.
For logics that we use for system verification each world consists to the state of the system in one particular time step. So world 0 defines the state of the system at the beginning and the worlds that are accessible from there correspond to the states of the system that we can reach by taking one step such as sending one message to someone.
The different logics that I mentioned in this post have no actual relevance to the thread, but they are just examples to show that logic has progressed quite far from the mid-19th century. Trying to discuss logic without being aware of that is about as helpful as trying to discuss the mind without knowing what has happened with brain sciences during the last 50 years.
That's a lot of words for "Whenever I'm wrong, I'm really just a new, alternative form of right."
The Man
Unbanned zombie poster
No, just that if you are honestly going to ask if something is a philosophical question you have to expect a answer in the affirmative to involve, well, philosophy.
Great, I'm not arguing for or ageist the usefulness or lack thereof of philosophy. Just noting the exitance of the very philosophical question asked about.
Simply demonstrating that the question wasn't being honestly asked. Any affirmative answer that involved philosophy, as the question asked, would be summarily dismissed as unacceptable. However, opinions on meaninglessness or not of the philosophical position noted doesn't negate the existence of the philosophical position that questions the relation asked about.
WELL SOMEBODY ******* NEEDS TO!
I'm so sick of this. Paragraphs of meaningless gibberish being defended with "Well I never said it was useful!"
People often ask: Why do I react so negatively to philosophy?
Because philosophy is the art of having either no point or a wrong point while somehow still acting superior.... AND taking forever to get there. It combines the two things most guaranteed to piss me off; being proudly and smugly wrong and WASTING MY ******* TIME.
If you're going to be both wrong and pretentious about it, at least do us the common goddamn basic human courtesy of GETTING THERE FASTER. Don't make us all watch you take the scenic route to your stupid word salad.
That's why again I say none of this is a methodology or an epistemology it's a persona. It's a character people are playing in some internal play.
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