Philosophical Phun - Social Privacy

Consider this scenario: A twenty-something male standing outside of the supermarket talking loudly on his cell phone making no attempt to hide his conversation. He is so loud and animated that you can tell he is angry with his significant other. Dollar-to-a-donut that you have experienced something similar and that it is painfully uncomfortable. Why do these situations seem to occur more frequently today?


As with most other topics, philosophers have not always agreed on the scope of privacy. However, most have agreed that privacy is a good or a right (privacy referred to here pertains to personal and social relationships not to the legal and constitutional aspects of privacy). With the exception of Plato and Aristotle (they viewed privacy as a negative concept), philosophers generally have promoted privacy as a necessary component for a prosperous and happy society. In social relationships, privacy allows one to “control who knows what about us and allows us to vary our behavior with different people so that we can maintain and control our various social relationships.”

Although it is a challenge to find a single definition that encompasses all we might care about when it comes to privacy, most people have enough strong intuitions about the subject that they argue in its favor and deem privacy to be a positive moral value. There seems to be something intuitive and urgent about privacy that it invokes a sense of discomfort in us when it is violated. The ability to control which details of our lives should be disclosed is something that people cherish and deem to be significant in forming and maintaining relationships.

Philosophical Phun- Enlightenment :o)

The Enlightenment is the period in the history of western thought and culture, stretching roughly from the mid-decades of the seventeenth century through the eighteenth century, characterized by dramatic revolutions in science, philosophy, society and politics; these revolutions swept away the medieval world-view and ushered in our modern western world. 


Enlightenment thought culminates historically in the political upheaval of the French Revolution, in which the traditional hierarchical political and social orders (the French monarchy, the privileges of the French nobility, the political power and authority of the Catholic Church) were violently destroyed and replaced by a political and social order informed by the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality for all, founded, ostensibly, upon principles of human reason. 


The dramatic success of the new science in explaining the natural world, in accounting for a wide variety of phenomena by appeal to a relatively small number of elegant mathematical formulae, promotes philosophy (in the broad sense of the time, which includes natural science) from a handmaiden of theology, constrained by its purposes and methods, to an independent force with the power and authority to challenge the old and construct the new, in the realms both of theory and practice, on the basis of its own principles. 


Many of the leading issues and positions of contemporary philosophical ethics take shape within the Enlightenment. Prior to the Enlightenment in the West, ethical reflection begins from and orients itself around religious doctrines concerning God and the afterlife. The highest good of humanity, and, accordingly, the content and grounding of moral duties, are conceived in immediately religious terms. During the Enlightenment, this changes, certainly within philosophy, but to some significant degree, within the population of western society at large. As the processes of industrialization, urbanization, and dissemination of education advance in this period, happiness in this life, rather than union with God in the next, becomes the highest end for more and more people. 


Also, the violent religious wars that bloody Europe in the early modern period motivate the development of secular, this-worldly ethics, insofar as they indicate the failure of religious doctrines concerning God and the afterlife to establish a stable foundation for ethics. In the Enlightenment, philosophical thinkers confront the problem of developing ethical systems on a secular, broadly naturalistic basis for the first time since the rise of Christianity eclipsed the great classical ethical systems. 

The general philosophical problem emerges in the Enlightenment of how to understand the source and grounding of ethical duties, and how to conceive the highest good for human beings, within a secular, broadly naturalistic context, and within the context of a transformed understanding of the natural world.


Deism. Deism is the form of religion most associated with the Enlightenment. According to deism, we can know by the natural light of reason that the universe is created and governed by a supreme intelligence; however, although this supreme being has a plan for creation from the beginning, the being does not interfere with creation; the deist typically rejects miracles and reliance on special revelation as a source of religious doctrine and belief, in favor of the natural light of reason. Thus, a deist typically rejects the divinity of Christ, as repugnant to reason; the deist typically demotes the figure of Jesus from agent of miraculous redemption to extraordinary moral teacher.  Opposition to deism derives sometimes from the perception of it as coldly rationalistic. The God of the deists, arrived at through a priori or empirical argument and referred to as the Prime Mover or Original Architect, is often perceived as distant and unconcerned with the daily struggles of human existence, and thus as not answering the human needs from which religion springs in the first place. 


Atheism. Atheism is more present in the French Enlightenment than elsewhere. In the writings of Denis Diderot, atheism is partly supported by an expansive, dynamic conception of nature. According to the viewpoint developed by Diderot, we ought to search for the principles of natural order within natural processes themselves, not in a supernatural being. Even if we don't yet know the internal principles for the ordering and development of natural forms, the appeal to a transcendent author of such things is reminiscent, to Diderot's ear, of the appeal to Aristotelian “substantial forms” that was expressly rejected at the beginning of modern science as explaining nothing. 


I find that those who claim to be enlightened today do not have a flipping clue as to what they are talking about.  This was about scientific and true moralistic and ethical thought, especially after the crusades and their bloody aftermath, not about divine intervention.  Give me back my history and my constitution, not your twisted conservative and historically inaccurate view of it.  Just Say'in :o)


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Philosophical Phun- Delusion:o)

Of all psychiatric concepts, it is probably delusions that have received the most extensive recent treatment from philosophers. Here the issues straddle philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. Some theorists have raised conceptual difficulties for accounts of delusions, others have sought to frame scientific hypotheses that can explain delusions in terms of information-processing deficits or other subpersonal problems.

Like many other psychological concepts, the concept of delusion has a fairly explicit and self-conscious scientific use and a variety of commonsense uses. There is considerable overlap between some psychiatric uses and some casual employments of “delusion”. But there are clearly everyday occasions when “delusion” merely refers to a belief that seems obviously false or unwarranted to the speaker. I might call you delusional when you announce that you expect to buy a four bedroom house in your neighbourhood for what you can afford to pay, without meaning that your reasoning is symptomatic of a psychotic illness; it is just wishful thinking.

But delusions in a technical sense are manifestations of psychosis. A delusion can be defined as ‘A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary ….’.

A purely philosophical approach to explaining delusions concentrates on the role the delusion plays in the subject's mental life, as understood in terms of some theories in philosophy of mind. Recent work in this area suggest that the role of the delusion in the subjective mental life of the deluded person that is critical.

You can look at the current political situation [or insert your situation here] and see how such an impassioned position has been established, complete with distortions of the past, half-truths, and partial disclosures to suit the perceived position - that whenever facts are introduced that directly refute the delusion are provided, they are outright discarded and often mocked, because to do otherwise would challenge the mental state of the delusionee.  

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Philosophical Phun - Faith As Trust :o)

The justifiability of belief that God exists is typically the focal issue in the Philosophy of Religion. Yet the theistic traditions always include a foundational claim about an authoritative source, or sources, of revealed truth. Religious theism is not just believing that God exists; it is believing that God exists and is revealed thus and so (in great historical acts, in prophets, in scriptures, in wisdom handed down, etc.). The reasonableness of theism is therefore as much a matter of the reasonableness of an epistemology of revelation as it is of a metaphysics of perfect being. A sticking point is that a loving God would make his existence clear—but this assumption is open to question. Perhaps God provides only, as it were, ‘secret’ evidence of his existence, purposely overturning the expectations of our ‘cognitive idolatry’ in order to transform our egocentric self-reliance ; or perhaps there may be significant constraints logically inherent in the very possibility of unambiguous divine revelation to finite minds.

It may thus be held that faith as accepting propositional truths as divinely revealed rests on believing in God—and it is this ‘believing in’ which is, fundamentally, the nature of faith. What more is there to believing in God beyond believing that God exists, on this non-reductive view?. To believe in God is to make a practical commitment—the kind involved in trusting God, or, trusting in God. (The root meaning of the Greek pistis, ‘faith’, is ‘trust’.) This, then, is a model of faith as trust—but of trust not simply in the sense of an affective state of confidence, but in the sense of an action. The fiducial model is widely identified as Protestant. Swinburne, for example, calls it the ‘Lutheran’ model, and defines it thus: ‘the person of faith does not merely believe that there is a God (and believe certain propositions about him)—he trusts Him and commits himself to Him’.

Trust involves a venture; so too—it is widely agreed—does faith. So, if faith is trust, the venture of faith might be presumed to be the type of venture implicated in trust. When we trust we commit ourselves to another's control, accepting—and, when necessary, co-operating as ‘patient’—with the decisions of the trustee. Venturing in trust is usually assumed to be essentially risky, making oneself vulnerable to adverse outcomes or betrayal. Accordingly, it seems sensible to hold that one should trust only with good reason. But if, as is plausible, good reason to trust requires sufficient evidence of the trustee's trustworthiness, reasonable trust appears both to have its venturesomeness diminished and, at the same time, to become more difficult to achieve than we normally suppose. If adequate evidence of trustworthiness is not required for reasonable trust, how is reasonable trust different from ‘blind’ trust?

Some philosophers have suggested that the challenges faced by accounts of faith as involving belief beyond the evidence may be avoided by construing theistic commitment as hope. They contrast hope with faith (understood as belief), arguing that a religion of hope is both epistemically and religiously superior to a religion of faith. Other philosophers identify faith with hoping that the claims of faith are true. Hope as such is an attitude rather than an active commitment: a model of faith as hope may thus, more strictly, take faith to be acting in, or from, hope.  I think that many cannot fathom the thought of there being nothing beyond our current existence, that there is no redemption from our daily sins.  My hope is that people will start to live their lives like they mean it, not relying on future forgiveness.

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Philosophical Phun - Collective Responsibility :o)

The notion of collective responsibility, like that of personal responsibility and shared responsibility, refers to both the causal responsibility of moral agents for harm in the world and the blameworthiness that we ascribe to them for having caused such harm. Hence, it is, like its two more purely individualistic counterparts, almost always a notion of moral, rather than purely causal, responsibility. But, unlike its two more purely individualistic counterparts, it does not associate either causal responsibility or blameworthiness with discrete individuals or locate the source of moral responsibility in the free will of individual moral agents. Instead, it associates both causal responsibility and blameworthiness with groups and locates the source of moral responsibility in the collective actions taken by these groups understood as collectives.

Methodological individualists challenge the very possibility of associating moral agency with groups, as distinct from their individual members, and normative individualists argue that collective responsibility violates principles of both individual responsibility and fairness. Defenders of collective responsibility take their cue from these critical arguments and set out to show that collective responsibility—as well as group intentions, collective action, and group blameworthiness—are coherent as a constructs and can be ascribed to agents fairly in at least some, if not all, cases.

Do groups have to meet the same stringent conditions of moral responsibility that individuals do? (Intentionality becomes key here.) What are the advantageous and disadvantageous of holding particular kinds of groups, e.g., nation states, races, and ethnic groups, morally responsible in practice? 

I find that groups often hide behind their collectiveness, and discount perceptions and actions at the fringes as anomalies, and outside the "intention" of their group.  I say that if they are affiliated, they are representative, and it is up to the group to reign them in.  What are your thoughts?

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Philosophical Phun - Immigration

There are a variety of important issues surrounding the morality of immigration, including difficult questions regarding the definition and moral status of refugees, the circumstances (if any) in which it is permissible to use guest workers, what obligations a rich country incurs when it actively recruits skilled workers from a poor state, and whether there are any limitations on the selection criteria a country may use in deciding among applicants for immigration.

 Arguments for Closed Borders

•  Preserving Culture: The most popular argument for the permissibility and importance of closing borders to outsiders is that this exclusion is necessary in order to preserve a state's distinctive culture.
• Sustaining the Economy: Another popular argument against open borders is that the influx of newcomers will hurt the economy. Some in the domestic economy may be harmed (typically the less skilled workers disproportionately bear the brunt of the costs, but the economy as a whole often benefits.
• Distributing State Benefits: A related but distinct argument for closed borders focuses on the distribution of state benefits like welfare payments and health insurance.
•  Establishing Security: Since 9/11, an increasingly popular justification for limiting immigration is the need to secure the safety of one's citizens.

There certainly are strong economic and security reasons for having tighter borders, but I think it is more of a national thing, not a state thing.

Arguments for Open Borders

•  Cosmopolitan Egalitarianism: The cosmopolitan egalitarian case for open borders combines the core moral insight that all human beings, whether they are compatriots or foreigners, are equally deserving of moral consideration with the central empirical observation that one's country of birth often has a profound impact upon one's life prospects.
• Libertarianism: When one thinks of the individual rights which conflict with a state's control over immigration, an outsider's right to freedom of movement is likely to come to mind. A state's exclusive immigration policy is doubly disrespectful of individual rights, because it interferes with both an outsider's freedom of movement and an insider's property right to unilaterally invite foreigners onto their land.
• Utilitarianism: Restricting freedom of movement leads to obvious inefficiencies and is therefore impermissible. There are any number of ways in which it is suboptimal to forcibly restrain people within territorial boundaries, but one of the most obvious worries is that it is economically inefficient.

Reality

•  Refugees: The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defines a refugee as someone who “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.” [Note that economic considerations are missing from the definition]
• Guest Workers: This practice was a sensible solution for all, since it enabled one country to hire foreign workers to do various relatively onerous jobs for considerably less than it would have had to pay its domestic labor force, and the imported laborers also profited, as they were able to earn considerably more than they could have in their own countries. However, the outside workers are often not granted full rights/benefits in their host country. There are interesting and difficult questions about how long and under what conditions one can work in a foreign country without the standard rights and privileges of equal citizenship before one becomes objectionably treated as a political subordinate.
• Recruiting Immigrants: Wealthy countries currently admit skilled workers from poorer states, often actively recruiting away from their native lands. It is thought to rise to the level of injustice when the wealthiest countries actively recruit professionals from developing countries where people with their skill sets are already in terribly short supply.
• Selection Criteria: Finally, one of the most complex and controversial issues within the literature on the morality of immigration is what criteria a state may permissibly employ to distinguish among applicants for admission. Countries might use either a lottery or a first-come, first-admitted waitlist, but they might also screen the applicants and give preference to those whose language, culture and/or skill sets make them most likely to assimilate in the host state's economy and political culture. But what if a country's immigration policies differentiate among applicants on the basis of race, sex, religion or country of origin? What if a country flatly refused to even consider applications for immigration from Asians or Africans, for instance?

In all cases in which there are national or ethnic minorities—which is to say, the vast majority of actual cases—to restrict immigration for national or ethnic reasons is to make some citizens politically inferior to others…. Seeking to eliminate the presence of a given group from your society by selective immigration is insulting to that group already present.

To me, not withstanding all the above, democratic societies/states are obliged to treat all of their own constituents as free and equal. The key is to control the influx at the boarders (after all, we can not economically welcome all comers). Once in country, we have a more obligation to treat all humanely. I would rather have some illegal immigrants in our country than resort to police state tactics.

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Philisophical Phun - Pure Experience

Nishida Kitarô was the most significant and influential Japanese philosopher of the twentieth-century. His work is pathbreaking in several respects: it established in Japan the creative discipline of philosophy as practiced in Europe and the Americas; it enriched that discipline by infusing Anglo-European philosophy with Asian sources of thought; it provided a new basis for philosophical treatments of East Asian Buddhist thought; and it produced novel theories of self and world with rich implications for contemporary philosophizing. Nishida's work is also frustrating for its repetitive and often obscure style, exceedingly abstract formulations, and detailed but frequently dead-end investigations.Nishida once said of his work, “I have always been a miner of ore; I have never managed to refine it” [I really like this statement, I resemble this remark :o)]


For an interesting summary of Buddhism, go over to Shock and Awe.

“Pure experience” names not only the basic form of every sensuous and every intellectual experience but also the fundamental form of reality, indeed the “one and only reality” from which all differentiated phenomena are to be understood. Cognitive activities such as thinking or judging, willing, and intellectual intuition are all derivative forms of pure experience but identical to it insofar as they are in act—when thinking, willing, etc. are going on.

Nishida would deny that his position is a kind of idealism, either subjective or transcendental, because no subjective mind, human or divine, is the origin of what is taken as reality, and no personified or ego-aware spirit is its beginning or end. His notion of pure experience clearly shows the influence of William James, Ernst Mach, and others, but it differs from their notions as well as from twentieth-century expositions of pre-reflective experience by its emphasis on the non-individuated character and the seamless development of such experience.

To me, seeing the blue of Crater Lake, or the frolic of a foal, the first sound of the hummingbird's wings, at that moment of first observation, and the sense of beauty and joy, are in line with this pure experience. Later, we may contemplate why they have that reaction for us, but the first moment of pure experience is priceless.

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Philosophical Phun - Judgement :o)

What happens in our minds when we make a judgement? [Brentano defined judgement as attaining knowledge and drawing inferences] Introspectively it is an act quite similar to making a decision, although its behavioral effects are different. Suppose you are uncertain what to think about the existence of extraterrestrial life. Some data suggest that life exists only on earth, others suggest that there may be intelligent beings somewhere else in the universe. Eventually you may become convinced one way or the other, and you either accept or reject the existence of extraterrestrial life. That is when you judge.

This example illustrates two judgement considerations:

1. Judgements require that something (some object) is given in presentation, but not that something is predicated of it.
2. Judgements are either positive or negative, depending on whether the presented object is accepted as existing, or rejected as fictitious or non-existing.

According to this principle, to make a judgement means to judge about an object that is given in presentation. But if something is given in presentation, this already implies that the presented object exists at least as an immanent object in our minds. So how can one legitimately deny its existence?

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Philosophical Phun - Prophecy :o)

Prophecy involves disclosing some important information that could not have been known to the prophet in any ordinary way. Prophecy is interesting from a philosophical point of view because it introduces interesting questions about divine knowledge, time, and human freedom.

In the monotheist religious traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), a prophet is a person who makes God's will particularly clear, whether or not doing so involves making any predictions about the future. When philosophers discuss prophecy, they are typically interested in prophecies concerning the contingent future. Let's say that a future event is contingent if and only if it is both possible that it happen and possible that it not happen. In other words, future contingent events are not determined to occur and not determined not to occur; they are “up in the air”, so to speak. Imagine that based upon the revelation of an infallible God, a person prophecies that some future contingent event will occur. Since God cannot be wrong, does it follow that the future contingent event must occur? And if it must occur, how can it be a free act?

Under this premise, our options are:

• There are no future contingent events. God's providential control over the world is so thorough and detailed that nothing is left to chance, not even free choices as human beings.
• Deny that God has any knowledge of the contingent future [open future]
• God exists outside of time itself [ever-present eternity]
• God has middle knowledge: through natural knowledge [nobody can control], God knows what is necessary and what is possible. Through middle knowledge, God knows what every possible person would do freely in every possible situation. So God decides which kind of world to create, including those situations in which free human persons should be placed, knowing how they would respond, and this results in God's free knowledge (contingent truths which are up to God, which includes foreknowledge of the actual future, including all human actions).

As philosophical thought processes are applied to religion, and we eliminate the absolutes (no choice or God controls all), then human free choice becomes much trickier to explain. All I know is that I absolutely believe in free choice and the associated consequences.

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Philosophical Phun - Punishment

The concept of punishment during the past half-century has shown a marked drift away from efforts to reform and rehabilitate offenders in favor of retribution and incarceration. Punishment in its very conception is now acknowledged to be an inherently retributive practice, whatever may be the further role of retribution as a (or the) justification or goal of punishment.

Justifying the practice or institution of punishment must be kept distinct from justifying any given act of punishment.

• Justification of the practice itself has reference to multiple considerations — social purposes, values, or goals of the community in which the practice is rooted.
• The infliction of punishment is normally intended to cause, and usually does cause, some form of deprivation for the person being punished, the infliction of punishment provides unparalleled opportunity for abuse of power.

To justify punishment we must specify, first, what our goals are in establishing (or perpetuating) the practice itself. Second, we must show that when we punish we actually achieve these goals. Third, we must show that we cannot achieve these goals unless we punish (and punish in certain ways and not in others) and that we cannot achieve them with comparable or superior efficiency and fairness by nonpunitive interventions. Fourth, we must show that striving to achieve these goals by way of the imposition of deprivations is itself justified.

The entire argument for the justification of punishment unfolds in the belief that alternative, non-punitive methods of social control have been examined and rejected (or severely limited in scope) on the ground that they will not suffice — or will not work as well as punitive methods in securing compliance with just laws.

As the prisons in our states and country continue to fill, and due to budget constraints, we start to release convicted persons early (regardless of whether they have earned their release), I think it is time for us to truly examine our philosophy regarding punishment and incarceration.  To me, we need to stop sending minor offenders off to prison, especially with few programs to help rehabilitate them, and go for more inclusive and developmental programs.  Give treatment to a first time drug offender instead of sending them away for a minimum sentence.  Put a young man convicted of non-felonous theft into a mandatory training program and on house release instead of locking them up.  These types of actions will help make them contributing members to society much sooner than sending them away for hard lessons.  

For non-violent offenders, I am in favor of rehabilitation instead of incarceration.  It is cheaper, smarter, and more humane.

However, for violent offenders, or habitual offenders, I am much more of the mind set to send them away for a long time (do the crime - serve the time), no appeals, no good behavior, no special priviledges.

What are your thoughts?

 

For full discussion, click through to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Philosophical Phun - Time Perception :o)

We see colors, hear sounds and feel textures. Some aspects of the world, it seems, are perceived through a particular sense. Others, like shape, are perceived through more than one sense. But what sense or senses do we use when perceiving time? It is certainly not associated with one particular sense. In fact, it seems odd to say that we see, hear or touch time passing. And indeed, even if all our senses were prevented from functioning for a while, we could still notice the passing of time through the changing pattern of our thought. Perhaps, then, we have a special faculty, distinct from the five senses, for detecting time. Or perhaps, we notice time through perception of other things.


In giving an account of the various aspects of time perception, we inevitably make use of concepts that we take to have an objective counterpart in the world: the past, temporal order, causation, change, the passage of time and so on. Later events cannot affect earlier ones, as a matter of mind-independent fact, and this is why we do not perceive the future, only the past.

And yet, as humans, we envision the future, strive to meet that vision, go down scratching and screaming when that vision starts to slip out of our grasp.  Of course, there are also those who seem to live in the past, entrenched in what was, missing out on the possibilities of what could be.  It is easy to see what has been, but takes a different kind of vision to see what can be.  Are you a "What Was" or a "Will Be" person???  What better time of year to contemplate this than the dawn of a new one :o)

For the inspiration for this entry, go to the original Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Philosophical Phun - Personalism :o)

Personalism posits ultimate reality and value in personhood. It emphasizes the significance, uniqueness and inviolability of the person, as well as the person's essentially relational or communitarian dimension.  Personalists investigate the experience, the status, and the dignity of the human being as person, and regard this as the starting-point for all subsequent philosophical analysis. Personalism tends to focus on practical, moral action and ethical questions.

The term person comes from the Latin persona, whose origins are traceable to Greek drama, where the πρόσωπον, or mask, became identified with the role an actor would assume in a given production. Such usage is carried over today in the word “persona,” referring to characters in fictional literature or drama, or second identities which people adopt for behavior in given social contexts. Its introduction into the mainstream of intellectual parlance, however, came with theological discourse during the patristic period, notably the attempts to clarify or define central truths of the Christian faith. These discussions focused primarily on two doctrines: the Trinity (three “persons” in one God) and the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity (the “hypostatic” union of two natures—divine and human—in one “person”).
 
At the center of this personalism stands an affirmation of the dignity of the person, the quality, insisted on already by medieval thinkers, which constitutes the unique excellence of personhood and which gives rise to specific moral requirements. Dignity refers to the inherent value of the person, as a “someone” and not merely “something,” and this confers an absoluteness not found in other beings.

For personalists, human dignity as such does not depend on variables such as native intelligence, athletic ability or social prowess. Nor can it result merely from good conduct or moral merit. It must rather be rooted in human nature itself, so that on the deepest level, despite the variations of moral conduct and the resultant differences in moral character, all members of the species share this dignity.

For the source, head on over to Stanford Encyclopeida of Philosophy.

I cannot think of a better argument for being bipartisan in politics, for recognizing marriage as a union of two persons, for treating each other with dignity and respect.  Human dignity is inherent in being human, it is that simple.

Philosophical Phun - Classical Logic :o)

Today, logic is both a branch of mathematics and a branch of philosophy. In most large universities, both departments offer sequences of courses in logic, and there is usually a lot of overlap between them. Formal languages, deductive systems, and model-theoretic semantics are mathematical objects and, as such, the logician is interested in their mathematical properties and relations. Soundness, completeness, and most of the other results reported below are typical examples. Philosophically, logic is the study of correct reasoning. Reasoning is an epistemic, mental activity. This raises questions concerning the philosophical relevance of the mathematical aspects of logic. How do deducibility and validity, as properties of formal languages--sets of strings on a fixed alphabet--relate to correct reasoning? What do the mathematical results reported below have to do with the original philosophical issue? This is an instance of the philosophical problem of explaining how mathematics applies to non-mathematical reality.

When mathematicians and many philosophers reason, they occasionally invoke formulas in a formal language to help disambiguate, or otherwise clarify what they mean. In other words, sometimes formulas in a formal language are used in ordinary reasoning. This suggests that one might think of a formal language as an addendum to a natural language. What do deducibility and validity, as sharply defined on the addendum, tell us about correct reasoning in general?

As an engineer by training, this one hits pretty close to home.  What do you find relevant, and more importantly, WHY ???

Philosophical Phun - Frame Of Reference :o)

A “frame of reference” is a standard relative to which motion and rest may be measured; any set of points or objects that are at rest relative to one another enables us, in principle, to describe the relative motions of bodies. A frame of reference is therefore a purely kinematical device, for the geometrical description of motion without regard to the masses or forces involved. A dynamical account of motion leads to the idea of an “inertial frame,” or a reference frame relative to which motions have distinguished dynamical properties. For that reason an inertial frame has to be understood as a spatial reference frame together with some means of measuring time, so that uniform motions can be distinguished from accelerated motions. The laws of Newtonian dynamics provide a simple definition: an inertial frame is a reference-frame with a time-scale, relative to which the motion of a body not subject to forces is always rectilinear and uniform, accelerations are always proportional to and in the direction of applied forces, and applied forces are always met with equal and opposite reactions.

My frame of reference is based on Nutwood Junction and my wonderful wife.  We live a simple life, but have a passion for making things better - environmentally, politically, and financially.  What is your passion?

Philosophical Phun - Pragmatic Arguments and Belief In God

Let me preface this entry by stating "It is important to recognize the distinction between theoretical moral arguments for theism (arguments intended to show that God exists), and pragmatic moral arguments for the rationality of theistic belief." This entry deals with the pragmatism for the rationality of theistic belief, and in no way is related to whether God exists or not. So, if you can make that distinction, please read on, if you are in a moral outrage that this is even here, please pass on by. For the full origin of this highly abbreviated summary, click here.

Pragmatic arguments have often been employed in support of theistic belief. Theistic pragmatic arguments are not arguments for the proposition that God exists; they are arguments that believing that God exists is rational. The most famous theistic pragmatic argument is Pascal's Wager. Though we touch on this argument briefly below, this entry focuses primarily on the theistic pragmatic arguments found in William James, J.S. Mill, and James Beattie. It also explores the logic of pragmatic arguments in general, and the pragmatic use of moral arguments in particular.

Pragmatic arguments are relevant to belief-formation, since inculcating a belief is an action. There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of pragmatic arguments that have to do with belief-formation. The first is an argument that recommends taking steps to believe a proposition because, if it should turn out to be true, the benefits gained from believing that proposition will be impressive. This first kind of pragmatic argument we can call a “truth-dependent” pragmatic argument, or more conveniently a “dependent-argument,” since the benefits are obtained only if the relevant state of affairs occurs.

Among the various versions of his wager argument, Pascal employs this Rule in a version which states that no matter how small the probability that God exists, as long as it is a positive, non-zero probability, the expected utility of theistic belief will dominate the expected utility of disbelief. Given the distinction between (A) having reason to think a certain proposition is true, and (B) having reason to induce belief in that proposition, taking steps to generate belief in a certain proposition may be the rational thing to do, even if that proposition lacks sufficient evidential support. The benefits of believing a proposition can rationally take precedence over the evidential strength enjoyed by a contrary proposition; and so, given an infinite expected utility, Pascal's Wager contends that forming the belief that God exists is the rational thing to do, no matter how small the likelihood that God exists.

The second kind of pragmatic argument, which can be called a “truth-independent” pragmatic argument, or more conveniently, an “independent-argument,” is one which recommends taking steps to believe a certain proposition simply because of the benefits gained by believing it, whether or not the believed proposition is true. This is an argument that recommends belief cultivation because of the psychological, or moral, or religious, or social, or even the prudential benefits gained by virtue of believing it. In David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, for example, Cleanthes employs an independent argument, “religion, however corrupted, is still better than no religion at all. The doctrine of a future state is so strong and necessary a security to morals that we never ought to abandon or neglect it” (Hume 1776, 87). Perhaps the best-known example of an independent-argument is found in William James's celebrated “Will to Believe” essay in which he argues that, in certain circumstances, it is rationally and morally permissible to believe a proposition because of the benefits thereby generated.

Unlike independent pragmatic arguments, dependent ones are, in an important sense, truth-sensitive. Of course, being pragmatic arguments, dependent-arguments are not truth-sensitive in an evidential sense; nevertheless they are dependent on truth since the benefits are had only if the recommended belief is true. In contrast, independent pragmatic arguments, yielding benefits whether or not the recommended beliefs are true, are insensitive to truth. Independent-arguments, we might say, are belief-dependent and not truth-dependent.

Phew, you made it all the way through, so tell me your thoughts. Are you outraged at the subject, are you intrigued by the implications to modern religion, are you contemplating the extension of the pragmatic arguments to other topics and applications?

Philosophical Phun - Artificial Intelligence :o)

The Chinese Room argument, devised by John Searle, is an argument against the possibility of true artificial intelligence. The argument centers on a thought experiment in which someone who knows only English sits alone in a room following English instructions for manipulating strings of Chinese characters, such that to those outside the room it appears as if someone in the room understands Chinese. The argument is intended to show that while suitably programmed computers may appear to converse in natural language, they are not capable of understanding language, even in principle. Searle argues that the thought experiment underscores the fact that computers merely use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no understanding of meaning or semantics. Searle's argument is a direct challenge to proponents of Artificial Intelligence, and the argument also has broad implications for functionalist and computational theories of meaning and of mind. As a result, there have been many critical replies to the argument. For the full original entry, click here.

I found this concept very interesting in our current information and technological age. While we may joke about people we know with faux intelligence, applying the true artificial intelligence question to computers is interesting. We have built cell phones that have more computing power than the first Eniac computer, and computers can out chess the masters. Will we ever be able to build a computer that will really be able to think, or feel, or reason. What makes our synapses so different than the silicon and gallium connections in the ever increasing powerful microprocessor?

Philosophical Phun - Delusions :o)

Delusions are a symptom of psychiatric disorders such as dementia and schizophrenia, and they also characterize delusional disorders.

As in some cases of erotomania, the content of a delusion can be mundane, and does not even need to be false: one can have the delusion that one's spouse is unfaithful or that one's neighbor is a terrorist, and these may turn out to be true beliefs. As in the Cotard delusion, the content of a delusion can be bizarre.

Here are some other examples: mirrored self misidentification is the delusion that the person in the mirror is not one's reflection but a stranger, and the Capgras delusion is the delusion that the spouse or a relative has been replaced by an impostor.

All types of delusions are rigid to some extent, that is, they are not easily given up because they tend to resist counter evidence.

Delusions may be inconsistent with a person's beliefs and behavior, are typically unresponsive to both counter evidence and counterargument, and are often defended by weak evidence or argument. The empirical literature suggests that the reasoning performance of people with delusions reflects data-gathering and attribution biases.

For information, click the link :o)

The most prominent delusion I can think of right now is the "birther" movement, followed closely by the "death panelists". Can you think of other examples?