OlivierK wrote:

OlivierK wrote:

Mick wrote:

OlivierK wrote:
Oh for fuck's sake what a train wreck to wake up to.

Mick, a million years ago, the consequence of treating propositions as human constructs (a view for which we have evidence, Mick, but I know you don't care much for evidence) is that 1 doesn't exist. For 1 to even exist, it must be false. Therefore what "follows" from it is unlikely to be problematic. Capiche? Do you remember your truth tables for "If A then B" when A is false, Mick?


He's the cat's father.


Nor false propositions, Mick. Nor syllogisms.

You've "demonstrated" that if I argue that a million years ago there are no humans and therefore no propositions, that at the time there are no propositions, a certain proposition has an indeterminable truth value. Have a think, again, about maps and territory, Mick, until you work out why this is not a problem.

You're not getting it. I am not designating the "syllogism" in a time or situation wherein humans do not exist, I am simply showing you what classical logic commits you to here and now-it is absurdity! If that is easy for you to swallow, then great. It seems a laughable price to pay to deny my argument.

Here's an exercise for you Mick:

Rewrite your two propositions being explicit about what time you are talking about - each time you use "is"/"is not" add "a million years ago" or "today".

See if you can avoid obvious shit like "If there is no human a million years ago, there is no true proposition today."

C'mon Mick, it's only a two line task, surely you can tear yourself away from your "Embarrassing Fail" thread for five minutes.

OlivierK wrote:

Mick wrote:

OlivierK wrote:

Mick wrote:Also: the fellow whom you defend stated that there is no true proposition in the absence of human beings, since propositions are human constructs. I want to show you some implications of that view. Consider the proposition:

1. There is no human being.


On his view, 1 implies that there is no true proposition. Thus:

2. If there is no human being, then there is no true proposition.

But, the consequent of 2 is itself a proposition. Thus, if it is true, then it is false; and hence it cannot be true. If it is false, then there is at least one true proposition. The antecedent is either true or false. If it is true, then the implication is false. Thus, his statement is false. But if the antecedent is false, then the implication is true. However, that would entail that there is no human being, and obviously that is false! Consequently, his view is in hot waters.

Oh for fuck's sake what a train wreck to wake up to.

Mick, a million years ago, the consequence of treating propositions as human constructs (a view for which we have evidence, Mick, but I know you don't care much for evidence) is that 1 doesn't exist. For 1 to even exist, it must be false. Therefore what "follows" from it is unlikely to be problematic. Capiche? Do you remember your truth tables for "If A then B" when A is false, Mick?

Mick wrote:I was speaking about the person whom you defend. He thinks that propositions do not exist in the absence of human beings! Thus, in the absence of human beings, there are no true propositions. I didn't suggest that this fellow -or you-is committed to the idea that there are no propositions.

He's the cat's father.

Mick wrote:Thus, in the absence of human beings, there are no true propositions.

Nor false propositions, Mick. Nor syllogisms.

You've "demonstrated" that if I argue that a million years ago there are no humans and therefore no propositions, that at the time there are no propositions, a certain proposition has an indeterminable truth value. Have a think, again, about maps and territory, Mick, until you work out why this is not a problem.

You're not getting it. I am not designating the "syllogism" in a time or situation wherein humans do not exist, I am simply showing you what classical logic commits you to here and now-it is absurdity! If that is easy for you to swallow, then great. It seems a laughable price to pay to deny my argument.

Here's an exercise for you Mick:

Rewrite your two propositions being explicit about what time you are talking about - each time you use "is"/"is not" add "a million years ago" or "today".

See if you can avoid obvious shit like "If there is no human a million years ago, there is no true proposition today."

Cito di Pense wrote:

Mick wrote:
So, you agree that there are propositions, since there are statements? Do you agree that propositions are truth-bearers? Once you tell me that, I'd like to know if you believe propositions are physical or not.

I would not accept a definition of a proposition as a true statement even if we defined a conjecture as a statement that had not been proven yet, and a theorem as a statement that has been proven. Perhaps I would say that 'proposition' is too general, otherwise; it sounds a bit tentative to begin with. But you see that it is not synonymous with 'conjecture' or 'theorem'.

If you think of a proposition as some statement you make with the aim of generating a sound argument in support of it, it removes the term 'proposition' from the bounds of formal logic, because a sound argument is just one that has not obviously failed, and unless we identify the slippery ways, for example, that synonyms are used in purportedly 'sound' arguments, we won't be able to say exactly what is wrong with such arguments. If an argument boils down to semantics, then it is wibble.

My earlier point is that proofs get to a certain level of complexity that requires writing. That's a big point about axioms and so on, that they are statements (as of properties) that taken together constitute a definition. But even if writing is not required in some cases, statements always have sources. Just because you don't know who first decided to state some law of logic formally, somebody did. And I agree with those who say that such laws recognise regularities in experience.

You have to go all the way to postulating experience as non-physical to underpin your conjectures about where the truths of logic come from. That hides a semantic argument on the definitions of 'physical' or 'properties'. Either that, or you have to go all the way back to saying that order itself is evidence of a deity, but that just assumes your conclusion. If you denote 'properties' as the axiomatic statements that make up your definition, then the significance of 'properties' is clear.

As for whether systems of statements are physical or not (even single statements), it's already been pointed out in this thread that since statements don't get carved in rock by bolts of lightning, we look to physical entities as the sources of statements. I get the feeling sometimes that god popped out of people's capacity to hide their sources.

So, your next move should be to define the physical in terms of a finite set of properties, with the aim of seeing whether your definition of 'physical' is worth two cents by seeing what other statements you can make about the physical using your axioms. If you're lucky, you'll be doing physics in only a few centuries.

VazScep wrote:

Mick wrote:

The antecedent is false.

Oops. You're right. Ha. The antecedent is true,

:confused: The antecedent is false.

Thommo wrote:

VazScep wrote:

OlivierK wrote:I think that Mick means that the antecedent is a truth, and therefore the sort of thing that is true or false.

On that supposed slip-up of Mick's, I read:

Mick wrote:Truths are propositions, the sort of things that are either true or false.

as saying that truths are propositions, and propositions are things which are true or false.

Nonetheless it utterly fails as being informative or definitive. It's somewhat pointless to tell the audience that a thing that is true is of the sort of thing that is either true or false.

I find it entirely unsatisfactory (for reasons that seem obvious) to define truth in terms of propositionality and propositionality in terms of truth.

The reason I pursued the line (although it failed as usual since Mick was concerned about history and who said what and I was concerned with logic and whether what he was saying is accurate), was in the hope that it would produce a tighter definition, or some specific context, ideally something like propositional logic - which as I later pointed out comes with a nice, precise recursive definition of both "truth" and "proposition".

In this case we can definitively point out that propositions are physical - they are things you write down, using particular symbols as defined by your choice of calculus. The laws of logic may or may not be propositions in this calculus. For example, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propositio ... ment_forms
The law of non-contradiction is given as a meta-language statement rather than a proposition. ⊢¬(p∧¬p)

Mick wrote:If the antecedent is false, and it is, then the consequent is either true or false. The consequent is false, and hence the implication is true, though that it is a trivial victory, since any consequent follows from a false antecedent.

Mick wrote:Writing is just a system to express a proposition. That you can use any symbol serves to evidence this point, since different symbols in different written languages can express one and the same thing, the proposition. Each symbol is about something distinct from the particular ink, shape and directionality of text, etc., and so what it expresses is indeed separate from its physical constitution. Likewise, when I utter something, I can say the same thing as that which you type or write.

Mick wrote:The point I am making here is not that propositions are not physical, but only that we shouldn't confuse them with the means by which we express them.

Mick wrote:But if propositions are over and above writing systems and our vocalizations, and even our hand gestures (in the case of ASL), then what are they? Given their intentionality, are they not best thought to be thoughts?

VazScep wrote:

Mick wrote:If the antecedent is false, and it is, then the consequent is either true or false. The consequent is false, and hence the implication is true, though that it is a trivial victory, since any consequent follows from a false antecedent.

It's not a trivial victory. You were trying to prove a contradiction from one of Cito's claims. Your proof doesn't work, because you got muddled evaluating an implication. That's a pretty definitive victory.

Thommo wrote:

Mick wrote:Writing is just a system to express a proposition. That you can use any symbol serves to evidence this point, since different symbols in different written languages can express one and the same thing, the proposition. Each symbol is about something distinct from the particular ink, shape and directionality of text, etc., and so what it expresses is indeed separate from its physical constitution. Likewise, when I utter something, I can say the same thing as that which you type or write.

Sure, we can form equivalences between propositions, but the existence and physicality of the propositions (which are indeed defined to be the statements or utterances) does not guarantee the existence or physicality of the equivalence.

Mick wrote:The point I am making here is not that propositions are not physical, but only that we shouldn't confuse them with the means by which we express them.

It's not a confusion, it's how they are defined - I provided the example of propositional logic earlier, which is typical.

Mick wrote:But if propositions are over and above writing systems and our vocalizations, and even our hand gestures (in the case of ASL), then what are they? Given their intentionality, are they not best thought to be thoughts?

They might very well not "be" anything. Given that a computer can (and has) been the first to generate certain propositions, as pointed out in the example of theorem proving computer programs, unless we are to believe that computers literally "think", that rules out the possibility of them being thoughts.

These problems about propositions aren't limited to the subject though, the same goes for a computer program. We could argue about whether it's a thought, whether it's physical - since we can create copies of a program and then call it the "same program" and specify that the program can be written in multiple ways or in multiple languages. We could debate whether this generalisation of the program "exists" or "is physical", but divorced of the emotional context it's easy to see that none of it matters, it's purely convention and we can always eliminate the problem by merely being tight enough with our definitions. The same thing of course goes for the original - when we actually carefully define propositions, statements and such (as in formal logic) the problem never arises, we specifically state when propositions are equivalent and don't then equivocate that with identity - for example that two instances of a proposition are actually the same thing.

Mick wrote:Escape contradiction to fall into trivial truth is a definitive victory?

Mick wrote:I'll get to the computer in a bit, I'm off to work, but you are refusing to properly address what I said.

A major point that I offer here is that we cannot take propositions to be the sort of things we utter, write down, etc. propositions are distinct from these things.

Mick wrote:I offered reason to think this. For you to respond that "it is just the way they are defined" is question begging. For one, I do no define them that way, and two, I provided reason not to define them that way.

Mick wrote:For you to respond that they might not be anything is befuddling. I argued that they cannot be reduced or identified to statements, letters, etc.. Thus, they are something more. Yet, you respond that they might not be at all? Then just what do you think is being expressed?

OlivierK wrote:

Mick wrote:

OlivierK wrote:

Mick wrote:Also: the fellow whom you defend stated that there is no true proposition in the absence of human beings, since propositions are human constructs. I want to show you some implications of that view. Consider the proposition:

1. There is no human being.


On his view, 1 implies that there is no true proposition. Thus:

2. If there is no human being, then there is no true proposition.

But, the consequent of 2 is itself a proposition. Thus, if it is true, then it is false; and hence it cannot be true. If it is false, then there is at least one true proposition. The antecedent is either true or false. If it is true, then the implication is false. Thus, his statement is false. But if the antecedent is false, then the implication is true. However, that would entail that there is no human being, and obviously that is false! Consequently, his view is in hot waters.

Oh for fuck's sake what a train wreck to wake up to.

Mick, a million years ago, the consequence of treating propositions as human constructs (a view for which we have evidence, Mick, but I know you don't care much for evidence) is that 1 doesn't exist. For 1 to even exist, it must be false. Therefore what "follows" from it is unlikely to be problematic. Capiche? Do you remember your truth tables for "If A then B" when A is false, Mick?

Mick wrote:I was speaking about the person whom you defend. He thinks that propositions do not exist in the absence of human beings! Thus, in the absence of human beings, there are no true propositions. I didn't suggest that this fellow -or you-is committed to the idea that there are no propositions.

He's the cat's father.

Mick wrote:Thus, in the absence of human beings, there are no true propositions.

Nor false propositions, Mick. Nor syllogisms.

You've "demonstrated" that if I argue that a million years ago there are no humans and therefore no propositions, that at the time there are no propositions, a certain proposition has an indeterminable truth value. Have a think, again, about maps and territory, Mick, until you work out why this is not a problem.

You're not getting it. I am not designating the "syllogism" in a time or situation wherein humans do not exist, I am simply showing you what classical logic commits you to here and now-it is absurdity! If that is easy for you to swallow, then great. It seems a laughable price to pay to deny my argument.

Here's an exercise for you Mick:

Rewrite your two propositions being explicit about what time you are talking about - each time you use "is"/"is not" add "a million years ago" or "today".

See if you can avoid obvious shit like "If there is no human a million years ago, there is no true proposition today."

Mick wrote:What do you have to say about my argument, the one that shows you what classical logic commits you to here and now?

OlivierK wrote:For 1 to even exist, it must be false. Therefore what "follows" from it is unlikely to be problematic. Capiche? Do you remember your truth tables for "If A then B" when A is false, Mick?

VazScep wrote:

Mick wrote:Escape contradiction to fall into trivial truth is a definitive victory?

Jesus. I had no idea you were this crap at logic. You've gone from fumbling trying to evaluate an implication, to this. I give up.

Mick wrote:
He is also committed to this:

If there is no one making propositions, then there are propositions.

Mick wrote:Likewise:

If there is no one making propositions, then the earth is made of blue cheese.

Mick wrote:Try your shit elsewhere,

VazScep wrote:

Mick wrote:Escape contradiction to fall into trivial truth is a definitive victory?

Jesus. I had no idea you were this crap at logic. You've gone from fumbling trying to evaluate an implication, to this. I give up.