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jackI know it's been a while since Chap I, but I've always had something else to do, and last night I started thinking about this again. I had been expecting to go on a while longer discussing occams razor and scientific methods, but I've found I'm more interested in moral stuff atm.
I believe some notation is in order before I can progress. I think a large number of arguments arise though the use of innacurate terminology, where a concept is very different to define, but everyone knows what it is, but two people have slightly different ideas about it, and don't realise that, and assume they disagree, whereas in actual fact they're just describing the same thing in two ways.
I'll start with a hopefully non-controversial example I borrowed from some authorial mathematician. Anna is facing a tree which Bill is hiding behind. She slowly sidesteps, walking all the way round the tree, which however Bill keeps between them. Question: has Anna walked around Bill? Colin says no, they were facing each other the whole time. Dulce says yes, Anna walked a circle which Bill was always inside. I hope you can see that both people have a reasonable claim, and since they're answering 'yes' and 'no' to the same question, feel they disagree. If you don't give me that, I hope you can imagine a similar situation where they would. Please don't argue with the example unless you feel no example would suffice.
The key point is that the word 'around' is ambiguous. This isn't bad: all words can vary in meaning slightly, that's how language works[1]. But in this case we need to be aware of it. Colin and Dulce are describing the same event, but are using the word 'around' in slightly different ways[2]. I say they should then use slightly more precise words, and find they agree after all.
Of course, in real life the situation is complicated by people disagreeing fundamentally, but we should at least know what each person says with little trouble, and hopefully the true disagreements will then be much more evident, and hence tractable[3].
For the purposes of my posts on these subjects, I propose two new terms related to belief, that will also apply to other related words such as "know" and "fact" and "true":
moral-belief: Belief that something is right, desirable, good, etc. Eg. "I moral-believe that you shouldn't steal."
factual-belief: Belief that something is true, or exists. Eg. "I factual-believe that the earth is solid."
Further division would be made for other arguments, for instance, degrees of certainty in factual-beliefs, or belief as in "a factual-belief held without evidence"[4], or belief as in "trust in or give thanks to someone".
Probably someone else has a better word for these concepts, either a better english word or phrase, or some greek words which are traditionally used in philosophy. Please enlighten me :)
[1] Someone once told me a wonderful analogy: words are like nodes in net, and we use the word *nearest* our meaning. Thus shifting meanings can make the language more expressive, whilst never completely precise.
[2] Mathmos may like to consider 'around' as meaning prescribing a curve of looping number one about the origin in a coordinate system which places the other person there. The ambiguity is that Dulce assumes the coordinates are fixed relative to the tree, and Colin assumes they are fixed relative to one of the people.
[3] I have a perhaps wrong but almost idealisticly held to idea that it's better to understand ourselves and each other, and if we do our differences can be easily solved. Obviously in many specific cases this is wrong, but all the same it will probably make it into Vol III :)
[4] This crops up in religious arguments. I factual-believe pluto isn't made of kittens, but someone says that that belief isn't 'fact' because it's open to being changed by the evidence. Then we should have different words for those. I'd say all facts (ie. things I factual-believe) are open to challenge, though there is a range: facts about observable things are more certain than facts about long-dead things, for instance, and facts about logic and reason we have to accept before we can admit the concept of evidence.
I believe some notation is in order before I can progress. I think a large number of arguments arise though the use of innacurate terminology, where a concept is very different to define, but everyone knows what it is, but two people have slightly different ideas about it, and don't realise that, and assume they disagree, whereas in actual fact they're just describing the same thing in two ways.
I'll start with a hopefully non-controversial example I borrowed from some authorial mathematician. Anna is facing a tree which Bill is hiding behind. She slowly sidesteps, walking all the way round the tree, which however Bill keeps between them. Question: has Anna walked around Bill? Colin says no, they were facing each other the whole time. Dulce says yes, Anna walked a circle which Bill was always inside. I hope you can see that both people have a reasonable claim, and since they're answering 'yes' and 'no' to the same question, feel they disagree. If you don't give me that, I hope you can imagine a similar situation where they would. Please don't argue with the example unless you feel no example would suffice.
The key point is that the word 'around' is ambiguous. This isn't bad: all words can vary in meaning slightly, that's how language works[1]. But in this case we need to be aware of it. Colin and Dulce are describing the same event, but are using the word 'around' in slightly different ways[2]. I say they should then use slightly more precise words, and find they agree after all.
Of course, in real life the situation is complicated by people disagreeing fundamentally, but we should at least know what each person says with little trouble, and hopefully the true disagreements will then be much more evident, and hence tractable[3].
For the purposes of my posts on these subjects, I propose two new terms related to belief, that will also apply to other related words such as "know" and "fact" and "true":
moral-belief: Belief that something is right, desirable, good, etc. Eg. "I moral-believe that you shouldn't steal."
factual-belief: Belief that something is true, or exists. Eg. "I factual-believe that the earth is solid."
Further division would be made for other arguments, for instance, degrees of certainty in factual-beliefs, or belief as in "a factual-belief held without evidence"[4], or belief as in "trust in or give thanks to someone".
Probably someone else has a better word for these concepts, either a better english word or phrase, or some greek words which are traditionally used in philosophy. Please enlighten me :)
[1] Someone once told me a wonderful analogy: words are like nodes in net, and we use the word *nearest* our meaning. Thus shifting meanings can make the language more expressive, whilst never completely precise.
[2] Mathmos may like to consider 'around' as meaning prescribing a curve of looping number one about the origin in a coordinate system which places the other person there. The ambiguity is that Dulce assumes the coordinates are fixed relative to the tree, and Colin assumes they are fixed relative to one of the people.
[3] I have a perhaps wrong but almost idealisticly held to idea that it's better to understand ourselves and each other, and if we do our differences can be easily solved. Obviously in many specific cases this is wrong, but all the same it will probably make it into Vol III :)
[4] This crops up in religious arguments. I factual-believe pluto isn't made of kittens, but someone says that that belief isn't 'fact' because it's open to being changed by the evidence. Then we should have different words for those. I'd say all facts (ie. things I factual-believe) are open to challenge, though there is a range: facts about observable things are more certain than facts about long-dead things, for instance, and facts about logic and reason we have to accept before we can admit the concept of evidence.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 04:28 pm (UTC)See, I want to argue with that. Not because of universal morality, but because I think that evil has a meaning. Although the OED has let me down and defined it as "The antithesis of Good" :-) Sadly, it probably has lots of meanings, and people can argue at cross purposes without realising this. So lets give a few examples, perhaps "evil: a thing that makes people unhappy" Well, this is measurable. At least in as much as people know their own happiness. We may not get it right, but we could get a sample population, kill half their families, and then ask them if they were happy or not, and if they said they weren't we could conclude that killing people's families was "this sort of evil". Or "evil: a thing that makes God unhappy" We could read the Bible, and the books of lots of other religions, and we could argue that there was measurable evidence that god was against killing. or we could argue there was evidence that god was very pro-killing. But there is stuff available to us when we try to work out if killing people is "this sort of evil". It may be practically impossible to know everything to do with god, and nothing may be proovable, but there are a lot of general things we can consult and study to look for trends. Whether or not God is anti-killing is not something we just have to guess. Whether or not killing makes people unhappy is not something we just have to guess.
There's a fuzzyness here, because there's mathematicians proof and historians / scientists proof. But we crossed a lot of those lines when we said things like "Ice cream makes people fat" or "Hitler hated Jews" which I think were both factual-truths, not moral-truths in your ideas. If you take "Hitler hated Jews" as a factual truth you can sort of see the case for "God hates killing people" being a factual-truth - there is (may be) a large body of writings and revalations that support it, and not many opposed... (???)
So if we pin down evil to a definition, then it's sort-of measurable. Or at least investigatable. So the interesting conclusion is if there are some words that are not fully definable - that we *know* what they mean, but can't say it. Intrinstically meaningless (or of meta-meaning) making them intrinsically unmeasurable
no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 04:40 pm (UTC)OTOH, Person A would drop litter. Person B wouldn't. Sometimes they've a different perception of how much that affects society, but I think a lot of the time B cares and A doesn't.
*That's* the distinction I want to make. Both might agree litter was slightly evil, but they demonstatably disagree about how evil it is in terms of what they *do*.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 04:47 pm (UTC)Or, alternatively (thinking outside the box here) they just don't get cause and effect. I think that's a big problem with a lot of people s actions.
So what we need to do is drum into people some important stuff when they're little, and then it will be important to them and they'll act on it. Fuzzy "do whatever you want" is very good and tolerant, but if people think that nothing is important beyond having nice food and clothes then well, they'll act like that. Duty and Honour and The Love of God made much better people, even if they were, err, fundamentally wrong about lots of stuff????
I wait anxiously for your next bit of free time :-)
no subject
Date: 2005-04-06 04:55 pm (UTC)