Recent Responses
This is the first sentence of Stanford Encyclopedia's article on rights: "Rights are entitlements (not) to perform certain actions, or (not) to be in certain states...." I checked my English dictionary, and it defines "right", in the relevant sense, as "entitlement", and "entitlement" as "right". In my own language (not English), there aren't even two different words for "right" and "entitlement", they must both be translated to the same word. I think we can conclude that "right" and "entitlement" are synonymous, as much as any two words can be. So do you think that there is any useful reading of that article's first three words? Thank you!
Thomas Pogge
September 13, 2010
(changed September 13, 2010)
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The author of the "Rights" article has now sent me a long response. If you want to see it and/or want me to put you two in touch, please send your e-address to thomas.pogge@yale.edu
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Couldn't we take the "ontological proof" of God's existence to prove that there are many God-like creatures? For instance, imagine a creature that has all thinkable perfections except for the fact that it has dirty fingernails. If existence is a perfection, then this creature must have this perfection, since one can both exist and have dirty fingernails. And so, if the ontological proof proves that God exists, then it proves that dirty fingernails-God exists too. Doesn't it?
Jasper Reid
September 13, 2010
(changed September 13, 2010)
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I'm with Thomas Pogge on what the real issue is here. For what it's worth, I'm also no friend to the Ontological Argument. But let's see if a supporter of the argument might have something to say in response to this challenge...
First of all, what form of the argument are we going to cons... Read more
Has there been much work done on the notion of approximate truth, for example under what rules of inference approximate truth is preserved, or what kind of metric one could use to say that proposition X1 is 'truer than' proposition X2?
Richard Heck
September 11, 2010
(changed September 11, 2010)
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Yes, there's quite a good deal of work on this kind of thing. It tends to go under the name "fuzzy logic" or "degree theoretic logic". The Stanford Encyclopedia entry is a good place to start. There's a fairly recent paper by Brian Weatherson called "True, Truer, Truest", if I remember r... Read more
I have a question about existence withing a formal system. Can we construct it so that a theorem t implies "there exists" theorem t itself? Thanks, Paul
Richard Heck
September 11, 2010
(changed September 11, 2010)
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I'm not quite sure what the question is here, but here's what I think is meant: Can we construct a statement S such that S implies that S itself exists? If that is the question, then the answer is "Yes", assuming we have some fairly minimal syntactic resources (namely, those sufficient f... Read more
Does "if p=q, then nec(p=q)" hold, if "p" and "q" are intended to denote properties? I am told that it holds. But it doesn't seem to be quite right. It seems to depend on what it is for two properties to be identical. Am I confused?
Richard Heck
September 11, 2010
(changed September 11, 2010)
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If two properties P and Q are the very same property, then how could they have been different? One could, indeed, have discussions about what it is for P and Q to be the very same property. But, if true identities are always necessary, then that fact acts as a constraint on theories of p... Read more
Couldn't we take the "ontological proof" of God's existence to prove that there are many God-like creatures? For instance, imagine a creature that has all thinkable perfections except for the fact that it has dirty fingernails. If existence is a perfection, then this creature must have this perfection, since one can both exist and have dirty fingernails. And so, if the ontological proof proves that God exists, then it proves that dirty fingernails-God exists too. Doesn't it?
Jasper Reid
September 13, 2010
(changed September 13, 2010)
Permalink
I'm with Thomas Pogge on what the real issue is here. For what it's worth, I'm also no friend to the Ontological Argument. But let's see if a supporter of the argument might have something to say in response to this challenge...
First of all, what form of the argument are we going to cons... Read more
I recently read Louis Menand's article in "The New Yorker" entitled "Head Case." In it, he asks this question: "[W]hat if there were a pill that relieved you of the physical pain of bereavement--sleeplessness, weeping, loss of appetite--without diluting your love for or memory of the dead? Assuming that bereavement 'naturally' remits after six months, would you take a pill today that will allow you to feel the way you will be feeling six months from now anyway?" Is this a philosophical question? If so, how would you respond to it?
Jennifer Church
October 30, 2010
(changed October 30, 2010)
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Menand asks whether we would/should choose to be relieved of the physical feelings of bereavement if we could do so without diluting our love for or memory of the dead. Greenberg claims that (a) thoughts, not feelings, are what is essential to emotions (the feelings being merely contingen... Read more
I became a vegan two years ago, mainly motivated by emotional distress at the thought of the pain and suffering that animals go through to be killed/farmed. Now I justify this decision to others for health/social reasons, because I don't know how to justify it morally. I instinctively feel that to eat an egg, whether or not the hen was free-range, or even if I just found it outside, would be inherently wrong, but I can't quite articulate why logically. I suppose if pressed I'd say that all sentient beings possess rights, or at the right not to be treated as property, and farming violates this right. Does this stand up to scrutiny?
Jean Kazez
September 10, 2010
(changed September 10, 2010)
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I think less is more when it comes to explaining why it's wrong to use animals for food. Animals taste good, but that's too trivial a reason for imposing serious harm on them--suffering and death. (As I'm sure you know, in intensive farming laying hens suffer in many ways, and for each l... Read more
When I am awake I see up and down and all the three dimensions as a present and irrefutable reality. In a dream I also experience those very same three dimensions but when I reference that experience in waking I correlate it with my physical body(brain) and not with a real independent feature of reality. While the idea that dreams represent the possibility that the world is an illusion is a persistent philosophical question I am more concerned here with how an abstract feature that seems to convey a part of the essence of what we call physical reality, that is to say dimensionality, is undermined by our dream experience. It seems that dreams demonstrate that dimension is not necessarily as commonsensical a feature of physical reality as it appears. Isn't dimension a feature which is central to our modern scientific understanding of physical reality and then don't dreams then call into question much of scientific understanding?
Andrew Pessin
September 10, 2010
(changed September 10, 2010)
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Not sure I fully follow your question, esp your premise. You seem to say that our dreams are 'of', represent, have the content of, the same three-dimensional space of which we're aware when awake; but then you're worried about how we 'correlate' dreams with our bodies/brains. Is your... Read more
Bertrand Russell famously said "(1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment." If I abide by these rules, what reason is there for me voting in elections, or even having a political opinion at all?
Andrew Pessin
September 10, 2010
(changed September 10, 2010)
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Not just political opinions but most opinions probably .... But anyway: who determines who the experts are, within any given field? and most of the self-proclaimed experts would repudiate (3) above: they feel there IS sufficient grounds for opinion, and that those grounds support the... Read more