Is morality objective or subjective?

[Peter Holmes]

We already have plenty of logical and linguistic tools to handle conflict and ambiguity because what we cannot accept is the notion that two statements that each entail the other is wrong could be simultaneously both true. The bullshit that VA and Skep are trying to sell us require the internalisation of the liar's paradox, which triggers a vomit reflex in all sane persons.

Nice angle. But my guess is that VA has no idea what the dick is on about - or that dick-bs trashes VA-bs too.

[Skepdick]

We already have plenty of logical and linguistic tools to handle conflict and ambiguity because what we cannot accept is the notion that two statements that each entail the other is wrong could be simultaneously both true. The bullshit that VA and Skep are trying to sell us require the internalisation of the liar's paradox, which triggers a vomit reflex in all sane persons.

Nice angle. But my guess is that VA has no idea what the dick is on about - or that dick-bs trashes VA-bs too.

That makes two idiots (Peter "Dumb Cunt" Holmes and FlashDangerdork) who don't understand how tautologies work.

The color of this sentence is blue.
The color of this sentence is red.
The color of this sentence is blue.
The color of this sentence is red.

All of the above are true because they are all tautologies.

tautology LOGIC a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form.

So here we are again on the battlefield between Monistic vs Pluralistic conceptions of truth.

The same old Philosophical bullshit...

[FlashDangerpants]

For two fact claims to be contradictory, at least one must assert by entailment the untruth of the other. This logical relationship places them in need of resolution, and until there is resolution, the fact statements are typically considered tentative, proposed, theoretical or moot (and so on).

I'm not sure that is universal practice or even scientific practice. Often what happens in science is one team considers the other team's fact false. You can have this in paradigm shifts or in situations where something does or seems to go against a preferred model. But there can be situations where contradictory facts are held to be true in a variety of fields and communities.

Note here how you are not able to tell the story about this without resolving it. You already tell me that there are people contradicting each other but you aren't saying that both are right, only that both say they are right.

As I wrote the claims are in need of resolution, but that is not the same as both being true while entailing untruth to the other which is a story you probably cannot put together coherently if you try.

We already have plenty of logical and linguistic tools to handle conflict and ambiguity because what we cannot accept is the notion that two statements that each entail the other is wrong could be simultaneously both true.

But out here in life, we often have to follow different ideas of truth at different times. Before the particle/wave dualism got resolved (if it did) people likely went on with one set of facts and other people or even the same people in other contexts going with other facts. We can look back and think, well, our concepts were limited and it merely seemed like a contradiction, but it wasn't. But one of my points was that here we are in the middle of processes of unraveling things. The other point is we presume things like natural laws, at least some do. So, we can't have a law as a fact and have things that go against those laws. However in recent decades there has been some scraping away at the idea that there are natural laws period.

There was a reason why I used the word "simultaneously", and broadly the same reason forced you to use the words "at different times". Again, this comes down to the difficulty (perhaps the impossibility) of putting together a meaningful story where the fact is true and false at the same time without the need to resolve the contradiction.

The bullshit that VA and Skep are trying to sell us require the internalisation of the liar's paradox, which triggers a vomit reflex in all sane persons.

We don't have to view everything as teams.

2) There is experimental and theoretical evidence that facts about reality can contradict each other both be true...
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.05080.pdf
and a more lay interpretation of the paper here...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/scie ... 33341.html

You see how they resolve the contradiction though, right?

That's correct, the thing can occupy two different states at once, which is something you cannot do,

We don't know the limits of this phenomenon.

So it isn't contradictory unless you insist that quantum things can only occupy a single state at a given time. "Particle A occupies state X" is not contradicted by "particle A occupies state Y" unless state Y entails not state X.

I think you're missing what their experiment shows or is evidence of. The facts are different to different observers. What happened or what was is different to the different observers. It wasn't in two states for A and two states for B. Different things are observed, because different things happened in their worlds.

The research is something that has only recently been technologically possible to investigate.

I don't really care about the science, this is an ethics sub. The point I am making is that nobody is able in human languages to describe this whole thing as contradictory truth without providing resolution. It breaks the rules of language and logic to do otherwise.

Maybe the thing you presented should properly be thought of as actual contradictory facts. There was no way for you to convey that, the contradiction had to be resolved enough that you could actually describe the scenario and thus you end up with a thing being in two states at once or else a better way of looking at things might be that the observation is observer dependent.

And generally, as they discuss in the lay article, observer independence is quality of scientific research and confirmation. Not in the sense of the old qm thing that observers influence or cohere something out of superposition, but that two things can be cohered out of suposition at the same moment.

It resolves apparent contradictions, that was my only point. The science sub can handle any other matters.

Makes no odds, you couldn't convey the story with real contradictory facts because we aren't tooled to think about things that way. This is a private language problem.

I'm not sure what you mean here.

That would be a long segue if you haven't read the Philosophical Investigation. But put in shortest possible order: Wee use language to convey meanings of thoughts, and it only works because we mean more or less the same things by these words as other users of the language. The key thing is that the concpets we construct our sentences out of are public, you don't choose what a word means, it means to youy what it means to everyone or else you happen to be mistaken not everyone else (think of the thing where Age tells everyone he doesn't believe anything because his version of "believe" is private, so nobody understands him).

Along with the concepts being public, so are the rules of the language games in which they are used. Think of a game of chess where one of the white pawns is missing so you substitute the hat from a monopoly set. If the white player then rolls a die and sends his hat clockwise for up to 6 squares and tries to buy the square he lands on, that move didn't have any meaning within the rules of chess.

So in general, whatever anyone tries to do, the words they use only have meaning if they conform to the understood rules ofthe language game in which those concepts are used. Thus the following sentence can only have any meaning at all if it is untrue: If X is true then Y is false, if Y is true then X is false, X is true, but Y is also true.

That sentence, if uttered with intent, could only be expressed in a private language. There's a second argument to be made about whether a private language would contain any meanings at all, but strictly speaking that arg is overkill.

I seem to be able to imagine a reality that is shifting laws and patterns and then also is not consistent between individuals. That at the macro level I and someone else could both correctly describe and event and contradict each other. And not because we saw only certain facets, which would always be the case, but because reality isn't a thing that we view in that old subject perception object model. I'm not sure what I can't think of here. But I likely missed your point.

I commonly deal with databases spread across many systems. It is quite normal for the value of an object to be one thing when reported by one host and another when the report comes from a seperate one. We scale and design these systems for eventual consistency.

You seem to be thinking that I am asserting there are no contradictions. There are contradictory expressions of fact, but the existence of a contradicitroy expression places the current statement in need of resolution. Every. Single. Time.

Eventually though, if we find a fact to be both true and impossible by virtue of entailment from some other fact, then that other fact becomes falsified.

1) that's why I mentioned time. We can have two correct facts, until it resolves, if it does.
2) Both facts might get confirmed, however we understand the context is more complex.
3) Both could be disconfirmed or at least seem to be.

You think that's why you mentioned time. But the real reason is that you are no more able to conceive of a true situation whereby contradictory facts are similtaneously both true than anyone else is. So you introduce time as a way of having an apaprent contradiction along with the necessary resolution required to make the concept meaningful.

If we have competing fact claims, and each insist the other is untrue, then neither is true by definition. You can have two peoplewho each think there is nothing that could contradict some belief they have, but that's a whole other thing.

Here we are in the middle of time with incomplete knowledge and a lot of working assumptions about reality.

And if we try to give up on just the notion of contradiction, we will fail as we would end up sacrificing the notion of falsification as well, and that would create a single-circuit self resolving paradox.

Or we move ahead, instead of deciding the whole thing has to collapse, with everything even facts as tentative, in some way, and even what we consider obvious ontology also tentative, in some way. Language can contradict itself but reality has is consistant/has laws, rather than say habits, perhaps local ones/events are what they are and not also something else and so on. I think this is what we actually do in practice, with individuals having different awareness of this, committment to tentativeness, openness to radically different ontologies and so on.

You could even look at this as a special case of cognitive dissonance.

We already know that facts other than those which are true by definition are subject to review in light of new information. That's a normal part of their being empirical and we don't need to sacrifice essential chunks of logic to permit that.

[FlashDangerpants]

We already have plenty of logical and linguistic tools to handle conflict and ambiguity because what we cannot accept is the notion that two statements that each entail the other is wrong could be simultaneously both true. The bullshit that VA and Skep are trying to sell us require the internalisation of the liar's paradox, which triggers a vomit reflex in all sane persons.

Nice angle. But my guess is that VA has no idea what the dick is on about - or that dick-bs trashes VA-bs too.

VA blatantly doesn't get it, but not getting stuff is his usual state. Years ago I used to warn him that Skepdick isn't actually on his side and there are times VA should reject his help. He didn't get that either though.

Although technically, even VA does attempt to resolve the issue caused by trying to manufacture fact out of shared opinion. He uses a credibility metric to rate fact claims coming from one FSK thing versus another. So he thinks he can say Astrology is 1% true and science has the other 99%. It's shit for morons, but it shows that even the mighty VA cannot conceive of true factual contradiction.

Skepdick likes to set up little 'contradictions' but they all either resolve or are just pointless burbling about something being red. But he has a dreadful personality disorder and I suggest not wasting much time on him either way.

[Skepdick]

I commonly deal with databases spread across many systems. It is quite normal for the value of an object to be one thing when reported by one host and another when the report comes from a seperate one. We scale and design these systems for eventual consistency.

Consistency in databases is not the same thing as consistency in logic you retard. Because deductive reasoning doesn't concern itself with time and ordering of events.

That's what the CALM theorem is all about. Consistency As Logical Monotonicity.

https://rise.cs.berkeley.edu/blog/an-ov ... m-theorem/

In simple English - as long as you have the full history of transactions and NO DELETE STATEMENTS your data is guaranteed to be consistent.
Either way you are stuck in Einstein's relativisstic paradigm of causal ordering - distributed systems use Lamport clocks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_timestamp

Of course none of this matters because all database operations occur in a monotonic paradigm.
There's such thing as non-monotonic logic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-monotonic_logic

In philosophical logic, defeasible reasoning is a kind of provisional reasoning that is rationally compelling, though not deductively valid.[1] It usually occurs when a rule is given, but there may be specific exceptions to the rule, or subclasses that are subject to a different rule. Defeasibility is found in literatures that are concerned with argument and the process of argument, or heuristic reasoning.

[Skepdick]

Skepdick likes to set up little 'contradictions' but they all either resolve or are just pointless burbling about something being red.

Jesus Christ, you really are dumber than Peter "Dumb Cunt" Holmes. If you can put my antinomies in quotes, then you can put all antinomies in quotes.

The triviality and banality of resolving 'contradictions' is the whole damn point. Contradictions are the just the logical manifestations of choice!

You have an "unresolvable" contradiction? No problem! Just make a choice! You don't know how to make the choice?!? No problem! Just flip a coin.

Code: Select all

In [1]: from random import choice

In [2]: choice(['X is morally wrong', 'X is NOT morally wrong'])
Out[2]: 'X is NOT morally wrong'

Your whims disagree with the whims of my Python interpreter? Sounds like an ‘unresolvable’ impasse. No problem! Play rock/paper/scissors.

Would any moral subjectivist like to raise any objection to this conflict resolution strategy? That would be incredibly surprising since pure, random whimsical choice on any moral issue seems like the paragon for moral subjectivism.

But he has a dreadful personality disorder and I suggest not wasting much time on him either way.

Of course you are going to take a swing at my "personality disorder" - just the excuse you needed to evade addressing your double standard.

Why is an antinomy about color “resolvable”; but an antinomy about the moral wrongness of X “not resolvable”?

[Iwannaplato]

Note here how you are not able to tell the story about this without resolving it.

I didn't tell a story without resolving it, because these are the stories we tend to hear about in the past. IOW they are not controversial, but for periods of time they were not resolved. Yes, some stories get resolved, but even in these non-controversial situations we move forward with contradictory facts. There are thing s that we consider paradoxical in science The assumption is they will get resolved. But that is an assumption. We don't give up one of what we consider facts.

You already tell me that there are people contradicting each other but you aren't saying that both are right, only that both say they are right.

I'm saying we don't know. And the experiment I listed is considered to say that both people are correct. We have two people who have witness the same event and correctly see it differently. And nicely on topic it is even written about in terms of facts.

As I wrote the claims are in need of resolution, but that is not the same as both being true while entailing untruth to the other which is a story you probably cannot put together coherently if you try.

I'm black boxing that. And, again, that precisely what that experiment showed.

There was a reason why I used the word "simultaneously", and broadly the same reason forced you to use the words "at different times". Again, this comes down to the difficulty (perhaps the impossibility) of putting together a meaningful story where the fact is true and false at the same time without the need to resolve the contradiction.

Again, the experiment. And I am not arguing that people don't have a problem with this, they do. I'm arguing that we should be more flexible in relation to this. I also think it happens. In the Black Hole information paradox scientists went forward holding both sides as facts in contexts where they needed to or felt they did. Sure, anomalies and contradictions bother scientists and they seek to resolve, but they don't at the same time give up what they've got. We don't have to decide.

Why must one pick a winner? In specific situations it may be best to work with one assumption. But that's different from deciding things now in general.

SoI don't really care about the science, this is an ethics sub.

OK, well you can ignore those parts.

The point I am making is that nobody is able in human languages to describe this whole thing as contradictory truth without providing resolution. It breaks the rules of language and logic to do otherwise.

That certainly how many relate to language and conclusions, but we don't have to, and we are certainly free to black box resolving contradictions when we have strong evidence for both conclusions.

It resolves apparent contradictions, that was my only point. The science sub can handle any other matters.

Well, I'll leave in science here. It seems relevant to the entire objectivity tangent that has gone on for months. If you want to ignore it, ignore it.

That would be a long segue if you haven't read the Philosophical Investigation. But put in shortest possible order: Wee use language to convey meanings of thoughts, and it only works because we mean more or less the same things by these words as other users of the language. The key thing is that the concpets we construct our sentences out of are public, you don't choose what a word means, it means to youy what it means to everyone or else you happen to be mistaken not everyone else (think of the thing where Age tells everyone he doesn't believe anything because his version of "believe" is private, so nobody understands him).

Along with the concepts being public, so are the rules of the language games in which they are used. Think of a game of chess where one of the white pawns is missing so you substitute the hat from a monopoly set. If the white player then rolls a die and sends his hat clockwise for up to 6 squares and tries to buy the square he lands on, that move didn't have any meaning within the rules of chess.

So in general, whatever anyone tries to do, the words they use only have meaning if they conform to the understood rules ofthe language game in which those concepts are used. Thus the following sentence can only have any meaning at all if it is untrue: If X is true then Y is false, if Y is true then X is false, X is true, but Y is also true.

Certainly the part of my post opening up the issue of a possible different kind of ontology from the one most people have, would lead to those words being different, in part. And, again, the reason that research got the attention it did was in part because it put into question our public use of the word 'fact.' The focus here has often been around facts and if it turns out that two facts can be true that contradict each other, modifications in the language may need to be made. This happens also. Language is in flux. Also it would likely change only where necessary. There would be different uses of these words in different contexts, which is already true.

That sentence, if uttered with intent, could only be expressed in a private language. There's a second argument to be made about whether a private language would contain any meanings at all, but strictly speaking that arg is overkill.

I disagree. Again, I think there is a way you are treating this as 'we must have a final truth now or here is how we have to talk about it.' I don't think we have to rush to clean it all up. If it turns out that what we would have called facts can refer to the same event/pattern and contradict each other, then we can start looking at how to speak about things. Perhaps we are in transition around that.

Here, I am proposing that two different things. 1) In a situation where we do not know at given points in history if fact 1 and fact 2 are correct. They contradict each other or seem to. We don't have to stop considering one or both as facts. We can move forward following both, being aware of the issue but using the information where they work. We black box the resolution. I think we do this in science, for example. The Black Hole information paradox was one where we didn't give up either end, were bothered, continued to look at it. 2) But then also 2, perhaps at an ontological level reality is not fixed in the way we think it is.

I commonly deal with databases spread across many systems. It is quite normal for the value of an object to be one thing when reported by one host and another when the report comes from a seperate one. We scale and design these systems for eventual consistency.

You seem to be thinking that I am asserting there are no contradictions. There are contradictory expressions of fact, but the existence of a contradicitroy expression places the current statement in need of resolution. Every. Single. Time.

Needs are human things. I recognize that people have this desire. And also that it is very useful to do this in many contexts. But here we are in a philosophy forum and we can explore things at a level that would be the same as dealing with databases in a workplace.

You think that's why you mentioned time. But the real reason is that you are no more able to conceive of a true situation whereby contradictory facts are similtaneously both true than anyone else is. So you introduce time as a way of having an apaprent contradiction along with the necessary resolution required to make the concept meaningful.

1) Don't tell me what I am thinking.
2) No, that's not why I introduced time. I introduced time because it fits one of the two DIFFERENT POINTS I am making.
One point has to do with the potential for ontological (to us) oddities where there actually can be two different contradictory truths about something. That's my more controversial point. The other point has to do with how we deal with contradictions whether they must actually all be resolved or must in fact be only be at most one fact. I was orginally responding I think to PH to where an idea was put forward that we need to resolve immediately or consider both tentative. Or not treat them as facts. In response to that I am bringing in the time issue. That we are in the middle and that we do not need to do what was being asserted.

If we have competing fact claims, and each insist the other is untrue, then neither is true by definition.

I don't think that's true even in traditional logic. That's the description of a disagreement. Certainly in cases of disagreement one side can be right. But perhaps there's a typo in there.

We already know that facts other than those which are true by definition are subject to review in light of new information. That's a normal part of their being empirical and we don't need to sacrifice essential chunks of logic to permit that.

Yeah, I don't think we need to sacrifice essential chunks of logic. One way to put this, the more practical issue of dealing with what seem like two JTBs is to not rush to judgment. We can sit with that, even for decades. That's not all I'm saying, but that's part of it.

[Skepdick]

Yeah, I don't think we need to sacrifice essential chunks of logic.

Your definition of "essential" differs from FlashDangerdork's definition.

He thinks non-contradiction is "essential" - you don't. This puts you in the same camp with para-consistent logicians and dialetheists.

So here we we are again. Logical Monism vs Logical Pluralism. Which Logic is The One True Logic?

And why do philosophers indoctrinated in the ways of non-contradiction think their way is The One True Way?

[Agent Smith]

Wishing well ... where's a wishing well when we need one!? Does the one caricatured in the cartoon I read bazillion years ago - bucket + crank - accept Singaporean currency? I'm gonna talk to the mayor of me city to have one built ASAP. Watch the headlines!

You like it here don't ya?

Hehe ... if it's not too much to ask ... may I hang around for ...

Another hour ... of course ... of ...

For a year, hehe.

Whaat?! I mean what a delightful proposition!

[Peter Holmes]

Just to say thanks, FDP and IWP - I'm enjoying this discussion.

And just to emphasise something that I reckon is much more important than we realise: outside language, features of reality, or states-of-affairs, or situations - whatever we call them - have no truth-value. They just are or were the case, neither (classically) true nor false. The truth isn't out there, any more than falsehood is. Only assertions (usually linguistic expressions) can have truth-value.

I suggest that, in rather different ways, VA and the side-kick-dick don't recognise the radical difference and separation between the way things are and what we say about them - and that conflation explains much of their confusion - mistaking models for the modelled, descriptions for the described, names for the named.

[Skepdick]

Just to say thanks, FDP and IWP - I'm enjoying this discussion.

And just to emphasise something that I reckon is much more important than we realise: outside language, features of reality, or states-of-affairs, or situations - whatever we call them - have no truth-value.

They just are or were the case, neither (classically) true nor false. The truth isn't out there, any more than falsehood is. Only assertions (usually linguistic expressions) can have truth-value.

So you are on-board with the idea that truth is a property of language.

That's called the semantic theory of truth.

If you paid any money for your Philosophical education - consider demanding a refund.

I suggest that, in rather different ways, VA and the side-kick-dick don't recognise the radical difference and separation between the way things are and what we say about them - and that conflation explains much of their confusion - mistaking models for the modelled, descriptions for the described, names for the named.

I suggest that Peter "Dumb Cunt" Holmes is so dumb that he fails to recognize somebody who understands the separation much better than he does. The separation is so well understood that I am constantly able to present you with multitude of descriptions for the exact same described.

If you subscribe to the semantic theory of truth then you don't get to reject the symbol-grounding problem.

The symbol "red" is grounded in this color.
The symbol "blue" is grounded in this color.

Which description/grounding is correct; and which description/grounding is incorrect?

Until you explain HOW you've solved this you are doing epistemology (anti-realism), not ontology (realism).

[Iwannaplato]

Just to say thanks, FDP and IWP - I'm enjoying this discussion.

And just to emphasise something that I reckon is much more important than we realise: outside language, features of reality, or states-of-affairs, or situations - whatever we call them - have no truth-value. They just are or were the case, neither (classically) true nor false. The truth isn't out there, any more than falsehood is. Only assertions (usually linguistic expressions) can have truth-value.

I tend to agree and I hopefully make this clear. One of my points is that we still have very strong ontological loyalties related to the features of reality being in some way stable and one thing. The event was the event and not also an event that is different. Not simply because one observer saw facets A, B, C of an event and another say D, R, Q. There are similar ontological assumptions related to things or 'things' and processes. I find this hard to write about, but hey, I grew up in for the most part a realism and it's not easy to write about counterintuitive things until they settle, if they do, into a new again stable intuitively syntonic idea.

I suggest that, in rather different ways, VA and the side-kick-dick don't recognise the radical difference and separation between the way things are and what we say about them - and that conflation explains much of their confusion - mistaking models for the modelled, descriptions for the described, names for the named.

I think they are quite different cases. But my sense of SD is that he is pressing alternative perspectives on things. If his discussion counterpart stays hard on their persepective and won't, in his judgment (fairly or unfairly judged we can blackbox), really consider something else, then he hardens on the perspective he is presenting as also possible or at least also a possible way of talking about the issue. I think he absolutely understands the distinction you are making here. He's challenging it's hegemony. (this is all my interpretation, but I'm certain he gets the distinction you are presenting here. He's just not agreeing with it in this context.)

VA is a different story, though I think its a complicated one because he leaps and justifies later or tries to. If one goes by his writing, I would say sometimes he gets it and sometimes does not.

Me, I want to press at what may be assumptions, and to some extent I am a perspectivist. I'd more likely identify as a pragmatist, which doesn't exclude perspectivism.

1) I think there is a rush to clean up things. Two supported conclusions. One must be wrong. We treat that one as merely tentative or dismiss it. We know two facts that contradict each other cannot both be true,. Period. Move on.
I realize neither you nor FDP but I think the way the issue is getting framed and responded to has that air about it. I understand that the main dialogue has been with VA for years and this affects the situation. I suppose I could start a different thread on ontology and pragmatism in relation to such issues as objectivity and facts.
2) I have to say that when reading the main debate between you and VA I have had the same reaction to your uses of 'fact' that some kind of conflation was taking place. I would often have used 'facets of reality' or something rather than facts, because to me facts are always in language. They refer to facets of reality, but the latter are not facts. (I can immediately imagine SD's objections to this, which I don't think should be dismissed, but right now they aren't so useful for me - there are only so many issues I want to explore at a given moment.

So, there's a kind of pragmantic issue about how we relate to contradictions or apparant ones between assertions that seems to have some merit. And then there's me wanting to explore the ontological assumptions about how reality must be.

I do understand your 'in the end, that would also be a realism because it would be rules and conclusions about reality', but if reality is so different from how we imagine, we would not for long periods think of it as a realism. For example if there weren't natural laws and events were subjective in the extreme sense of that word, perhaps even if the past was not stable. Then objectivity and realism and facts radically change. Sure, if we decide it's true it would be some kind of realism, but perhaps not mind independent, perhaps without laws in the sense we have them now, etc.
And to be clear, most antirealisms can make one think of the ding an sich or things in themselves, as being out there and in a sense stable, just beyond our ability to be sure about. But perhaps they are not stable. It's not a matter of filters twisting, metaphors being taken literally, the limits of our senses...but there is a something there. Perhaps the whole thing is more flexible than that.

My goal is not to win over, but rather to put some serious asterisks around ontologicall assumptions and then also I have suggestions about pragmatic reactions to contradictions.

This is a fairly resolved example of the latter idea. Once particles and waves were mutually exclusive concepts and phenomena. When evidence was coming in that some 'things' were both, we could decide that one of those sets of evidence and attendant models was wrong. Or we could move forward treat both, likely in different research and different contexts as true. Later we found that we had ontological assumptions and both could be true in certain senses. But there is this enormous press to elminate contradictions. Shove that in category A of the wannabes. This can and does cause problems. This can slow down the reception of anomalies, new ideas with all the attendant problems with that. And that's without even bringing in things like anti-realism.

I also think we can be more flexible about ontology but these are (or perhaps 'can be' ) separate, related and likely overlapping issues.

[Skepdick]

Just to say thanks, FDP and IWP - I'm enjoying this discussion.

The inability to have difficult conversations (especially ones you aren't enjoying) with people you very much dislike is part and parcel of what makes you come across as an intolerant and intolerable idiot.

Conflict avoidance undermines conflict resolution.

[FlashDangerpants]

Note here how you are not able to tell the story about this without resolving it.

I didn't tell a story without resolving it, because these are the stories we tend to hear about in the past. IOW they are not controversial, but for periods of time they were not resolved. Yes, some stories get resolved, but even in these non-controversial situations we move forward with contradictory facts. There are thing s that we consider paradoxical in science The assumption is they will get resolved. But that is an assumption. We don't give up one of what we consider facts.

You already tell me that there are people contradicting each other but you aren't saying that both are right, only that both say they are right.

I'm saying we don't know. And the experiment I listed is considered to say that both people are correct. We have two people who have witness the same event and correctly see it differently. And nicely on topic it is even written about in terms of facts.

As I wrote the claims are in need of resolution, but that is not the same as both being true while entailing untruth to the other which is a story you probably cannot put together coherently if you try.

I'm black boxing that. And, again, that precisely what that experiment showed.

There was a reason why I used the word "simultaneously", and broadly the same reason forced you to use the words "at different times". Again, this comes down to the difficulty (perhaps the impossibility) of putting together a meaningful story where the fact is true and false at the same time without the need to resolve the contradiction.

Again, the experiment. And I am not arguing that people don't have a problem with this, they do. I'm arguing that we should be more flexible in relation to this. I also think it happens. In the Black Hole information paradox scientists went forward holding both sides as facts in contexts where they needed to or felt they did. Sure, anomalies and contradictions bother scientists and they seek to resolve, but they don't at the same time give up what they've got. We don't have to decide.

Why must one pick a winner? In specific situations it may be best to work with one assumption. But that's different from deciding things now in general.

Suppose a guy goes on trial, and the judge asks for his plea - guilty or not guilty. The man responds "guilty AND not guilty".
The judge isn't cool with that, he asks the defendant if he means to accept partial responsibility? In that case we can all undestand the whole part guilty but not wholly guilty thing, however within the terms of the law, he would be pleading guilty and then claiming mitigating circumstances. This, the judge explains, shows us that in the legal context, facts about blame are bivalent, but in normal day to day life, they can be ambivalent.... in such cases, there are times we need to resolve matters to avoid contradiction, and other times where we can split the difference, because the concepts we use allow that sort of thing.

"no" the defendant responds, "I am guilty because I was there and I shot the man in the head. But I am not guilty because I was not there at all, I was 100 miles away buying an orange toilet at the time that man was shot (by me)". This the defendant explains is not one of those bivalence/ambivalence things, this is just outright contradiction. The judge gives him an extra 10 years in jail for being a dick.

The defendant has rejected the black boxing of his case, it has been orange toileted.

The point I am making is that nobody is able in human languages to describe this whole thing as contradictory truth without providing resolution. It breaks the rules of language and logic to do otherwise.

That certainly how many relate to language and conclusions, but we don't have to, and we are certainly free to black box resolving contradictions when we have strong evidence for both conclusions.

It resolves apparent contradictions, that was my only point. The science sub can handle any other matters.

Well, I'll leave in science here. It seems relevant to the entire objectivity tangent that has gone on for months. If you want to ignore it, ignore it.

That would be a long segue if you haven't read the Philosophical Investigation. But put in shortest possible order: Wee use language to convey meanings of thoughts, and it only works because we mean more or less the same things by these words as other users of the language. The key thing is that the concpets we construct our sentences out of are public, you don't choose what a word means, it means to youy what it means to everyone or else you happen to be mistaken not everyone else (think of the thing where Age tells everyone he doesn't believe anything because his version of "believe" is private, so nobody understands him).

Along with the concepts being public, so are the rules of the language games in which they are used. Think of a game of chess where one of the white pawns is missing so you substitute the hat from a monopoly set. If the white player then rolls a die and sends his hat clockwise for up to 6 squares and tries to buy the square he lands on, that move didn't have any meaning within the rules of chess.

So in general, whatever anyone tries to do, the words they use only have meaning if they conform to the understood rules ofthe language game in which those concepts are used. Thus the following sentence can only have any meaning at all if it is untrue: If X is true then Y is false, if Y is true then X is false, X is true, but Y is also true.

Certainly the part of my post opening up the issue of a possible different kind of ontology from the one most people have, would lead to those words being different, in part. And, again, the reason that research got the attention it did was in part because it put into question our public use of the word 'fact.' The focus here has often been around facts and if it turns out that two facts can be true that contradict each other, modifications in the language may need to be made. This happens also. Language is in flux. Also it would likely change only where necessary. There would be different uses of these words in different contexts, which is already true.

That sentence, if uttered with intent, could only be expressed in a private language. There's a second argument to be made about whether a private language would contain any meanings at all, but strictly speaking that arg is overkill.

I disagree. Again, I think there is a way you are treating this as 'we must have a final truth now or here is how we have to talk about it.' I don't think we have to rush to clean it all up. If it turns out that what we would have called facts can refer to the same event/pattern and contradict each other, then we can start looking at how to speak about things. Perhaps we are in transition around that.

Take a look at the incel ridden hell hole that is the Gender sub on this site. A similar but much less brain mellting paradigm shift is responsible for all the anguish therein, I refer to the gradual change in the meaning of the term "gender" in western languagues (to be more similar I am told to the same sort of idea in a couple of non western language groups). For that transition (pun utterly intended) all that happens is gender stops being strictly a binary definition along male/female sex identity lines and becomes something slightly fluid with elements of self definition. And people are losing their shit failing to keep up with that trivial change.

Making up=down and correct=mistake is a much bigger thing.

Here, I am proposing that two different things. 1) In a situation where we do not know at given points in history if fact 1 and fact 2 are correct. They contradict each other or seem to. We don't have to stop considering one or both as facts. We can move forward following both, being aware of the issue but using the information where they work. We black box the resolution. I think we do this in science, for example. The Black Hole information paradox was one where we didn't give up either end, were bothered, continued to look at it. 2) But then also 2, perhaps at an ontological level reality is not fixed in the way we think it is.

That's a switch (and a perfectly valid one) from truth function to utility function. We provisionally use our best information and if the competing hypotheses are equally supported as of now we progress with either in mind on the basis of underdetermination. Then we switch to truth function when the matter is resolved by falsification of the mistaken hypothesis.

By 'black box' you seem to be referencing that for a given purpose one explanation is as good as the other. That's fine, but it is not the same as saying they are both true even if each can only be true if the other is untrue.

I commonly deal with databases spread across many systems. It is quite normal for the value of an object to be one thing when reported by one host and another when the report comes from a seperate one. We scale and design these systems for eventual consistency.

You seem to be thinking that I am asserting there are no contradictions. There are contradictory expressions of fact, but the existence of a contradicitroy expression places the current statement in need of resolution. Every. Single. Time.

Needs are human things. I recognize that people have this desire. And also that it is very useful to do this in many contexts. But here we are in a philosophy forum and we can explore things at a level that would be the same as dealing with databases in a workplace.

You think that's why you mentioned time. But the real reason is that you are no more able to conceive of a true situation whereby contradictory facts are similtaneously both true than anyone else is. So you introduce time as a way of having an apaprent contradiction along with the necessary resolution required to make the concept meaningful.

1) Don't tell me what I am thinking.
2) No, that's not why I introduced time. I introduced time because it fits one of the two DIFFERENT POINTS I am making.
One point has to do with the potential for ontological (to us) oddities where there actually can be two different contradictory truths about something. That's my more controversial point. The other point has to do with how we deal with contradictions whether they must actually all be resolved or must in fact be only be at most one fact. I was orginally responding I think to PH to where an idea was put forward that we need to resolve immediately or consider both tentative. Or not treat them as facts. In response to that I am bringing in the time issue. That we are in the middle and that we do not need to do what was being asserted.

If we have competing fact claims, and each insist the other is untrue, then neither is true by definition.

I don't think that's true even in traditional logic. That's the description of a disagreement. Certainly in cases of disagreement one side can be right. But perhaps there's a typo in there.

My last bit there is sloppily worded I admit. If there are mutually exclusive truth claims, and no way to determine one to be true and therefore the other to be false, then neither claim is justified. It is a conceptual violation to say that both are right and therefore both are wrong. It is dereliction of duty to just say both are right and try to ignore the mutual entailment of wrongness.

You know these rules I am referencing and you follow them even when you try not to. That is why you need all these orange toilets and future resolutions.

We already know that facts other than those which are true by definition are subject to review in light of new information. That's a normal part of their being empirical and we don't need to sacrifice essential chunks of logic to permit that.

Yeah, I don't think we need to sacrifice essential chunks of logic. One way to put this, the more practical issue of dealing with what seem like two JTBs is to not rush to judgment. We can sit with that, even for decades. That's not all I'm saying, but that's part of it.

There's a world of difference between not rushing to judgment about a contradiction versus rushing to judge that the contradiction is unproblematic.

[Skepdick]

Suppose a guy goes on trial, and the judge asks for his plea - guilty or not guilty. The man responds "guilty AND not guilty".

The defense says "not guilty"
The prosecution says "guilty"

Where's the mutual exclusivity?

Furthermore the guy gets technical and says "I am innocent, which is technical/legal terms is not the same thing as not guilty".

The prosecution failing to meet its burden doesn't amount to innocence of the act. It's perfectly possible to be held liable in a civil trial even though you've been found not guilty in a criminal trial