Recent Responses
Two people might be in an argument with one another and disagree on the outcome. We might say that one person thinks the argument is sound, while another does not. That is to say, the argument depends upon some (possibly unknowable or undecidable) assumptions, and the two people disagree in their belief of whether the assumptions actually are true. Is it fair to say that any disagreement about the validity of an argument should always be reconcilable? Even if the disagreement is about the reasoning process itself, this disagreement should be reducible to axioms which both participants hold or don't hold arbitrarily. I am confused about why there is so much disagreement in philosophical circles. If arguments drew from fundamental assumptions (such as whether a being has natural rights), then it seems arguments should conclude quite reasonably with "Aha, well I see that you have an arbitrary belief in this, while I have an arbitrary belief in that". Unless the assumption of some argument is itself the subject of truth for some other argument (and some other assumptions), should not all arguments end in this way -- with understanding of both side's assumptions and an agreement on validity? I am confused why both sides should not recognize that the other is just as unknowably sound when described in terms of arbitrary assumptions. Are there philosophical arguments that don't fit this model? Is it simply that philosophical arguments are so complex that we cannot agree on whether any given argument is valid?
Nicholas D. Smith
March 27, 2008
(changed March 27, 2008)
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Let's go slow here. First, philosophers generally distinguish between the validity of an argument and the soundness of an argument. A valid argument is one whose inferences are of a truth preserving form. In other words, in a valid argument, if the premises are true, the conclusion will... Read more
If humans didn't exist, would animals still have rights?
Allen Stairs
March 27, 2008
(changed March 27, 2008)
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We might start by pointing out that there's a controversy about just what rights are and also about whether animals have rights, but let's try to finesse those issues. On one common way of understanding rights, for me to have a right is for people or institutions to be obliged to treat me in a c... Read more
Depending on which normative system you adopt the statements like “He is a moral person” or “In that situation that was the moral thing to do” will have different content, since what is moral is different in different normative systems. That being said then when looking at ordinary language usage by non-philosophers in everyday life situations I would claim (at least based on my experience) that people tend to use the term “moral person” or “a moral deed” in some sense with a universal meaning, just as if the term would refer to the same kind of people or deeds. Could you please care to speculate on why this is so? Is it only that people are careless or uninformed or might it be that there really are some “universally moral” things and people want to refer to them or is it just the particular culture they happen to live in? Or something else?
Allen Stairs
March 27, 2008
(changed March 27, 2008)
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Some systems of rules and codes of conduct are arbitrary. In Canadian football, it's 3 downs; in the USA it's 4. There's no question of which is really right, and if the CFL or the NFL decided to change its rules, no one could object that the proposed new rules were wrong. Likewise, a fraternity... Read more
Derren Brown recently had a show in which he flipped ten heads in a row. He just flipped coins all day and waited for it to happen eventually. If I flip a fair coin, I should believe there's a 50% chance it will come up heads. If I flip it three times, I should believe there's a 12.5% chance it will come up heads three times. If I have eight goes at flipping it three times, it seems I should believe there's a 100% chance of flipping three heads. If that's right, what's wrong with being increasingly confident at the beginning of each set of flips that this will be the one in which I flip three heads? It's obviously a bad argument: every time I fip the coin, there's a 50% chance it will turn up heads. But how could it be rational for me to bet that during the course of a day of coin flipping I'll flip three heads eventually but not be rational for me to be increasingly confident that the next set of three flips will be of three heads as the day progresses? Matthew
Peter Smith
March 26, 2008
(changed March 26, 2008)
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Yes, if I flip a fair coin 3 times I have a 1 in 23 (i.e. 1 in 8, i.e. 12.5%) chance of throwing three heads. How do we get that result? The rule is that if P and Q are independent events, then the chance of (P and Q) = chance of P x chance of Q. Likewise, if P, Q and R are independent events, th... Read more
Has anyone ever asked a question that could not be answered philosophically? I'm not asking whether anyone's asked a question that cannot be answered by a philosopher -- presumably, a philosopher cannot answer whether the universe is intelligent or whether human beings deserve to live. But is there any question that cannot be philosophized about?
Allen Stairs
March 25, 2008
(changed March 25, 2008)
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On your general question: "is there any question that cannot be philosophized about?" I think I can provide a proof that the answer is no. Suppose, for reductio, that there is such a question, call it Q. Then the question of why we can't philosophize about Q is a perfectly good and obviously phi... Read more
What is all this mystery about God? The secrecy? If the guy exists, why doesn't he show himself - VISUALLY - to us? Anne, age 13
Peter Smith
March 23, 2008
(changed March 23, 2008)
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"Ok, ok," says Anne, "fair point. But I guess I'm not really hung up about the visual thing. A booming voice from the sky would do. Or even a few more signs like burning bushes in the Moses story. But something in your face and unmissable. Sure, people say they have evidence of God. But why does... Read more
What is all this mystery about God? The secrecy? If the guy exists, why doesn't he show himself - VISUALLY - to us? Anne, age 13
Peter Smith
March 23, 2008
(changed March 23, 2008)
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"Ok, ok," says Anne, "fair point. But I guess I'm not really hung up about the visual thing. A booming voice from the sky would do. Or even a few more signs like burning bushes in the Moses story. But something in your face and unmissable. Sure, people say they have evidence of God. But why does... Read more
Does it make sense to talk of "probability" with regard to existential claims? Consider the following propositions: (1) Rolling snake eyes is improbable. (2) The existence of Big Foot is improbable. Though I can't quite finger the distinction, it seems to me that the notion of probability is being used very differently in (1) and (2).
Peter Smith
March 22, 2008
(changed March 22, 2008)
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Yes, different notions are indeed at stake here. We need to distinguish physical probabilities from evidential probabilities.
Physical probabilities, also known as chances, are what are involved when we say, for example, that
An atom of plutonium 238 has a 50/50 chance of decaying within 88 year... Read more
To what extent should an organisation or company aligned with a religious order be subject to general employment law? For example, in a general workplace, if someone became pregnant outside of marriage, there would be no issue in terms of their employment/maternity rights, etc. However, if someone works for a church organisation and the church believes that sex before marriage is wrong, condoning this scenario would be contrary to the belief system in place. I believe that any religion-based discrimination is wrong but I was wondering how one might philosophically justify this sort of dilemma.
Oliver Leaman
March 22, 2008
(changed March 22, 2008)
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Discrimination is wrong if it has no basis in a solid ethical reason for treating people differently, so I don't think you are right in saying that "any religion-based discrimination is wrong". A religion is entitled to take a negative view of a particular sort of behaviour and then to discrimi... Read more
Please pardon the awkward structure of this question; I am afraid the insuperable inadequacies of autodidacticism will prevent me from asking it clearly. What I want to know is, in a nutshell: Is the Past eternal? That is to say, it makes sense to make statements about the Present (if in fact there is a present; one sometimes reads there isn't) which take the form "X is the case." It also obviously makes sense to say, where t is some point in the Past, things like, "At time t, X was the case." But I'm much less confident that I'm allowed to have sentences like (if X is no longer the case but used to be at t, which is in the past) "At time t, X will always have been the case." And in fact I want very badly to say not only that but "For any X which once obtained, is obtaining, or will obtain, at any time T, will always once have obtained." I also want to believe this not only of propositions which once held, but also of all phenomena & entities which ever occurred & existed. (That they will always once have occurred/existed.)Is that true? My motive for asking the question, in case I have done so too clumsily to suggest how it might be answered, is what Russell somewhere calls the "curse of the philosophic temperament": that I have the religious fanatics's need desperately to believe noble or beautiful things about the universe I live in, coupled with the man of science's stubborn inability to believe anything I suspect may well be false. When I was very young, & went to Jesuit school, I expected the sort of actual immortality that was promised to me, but then I discovered that there's no reason whatsoever to suppose I even have/am a Cartesian "res cogitans"/"ego," let alone an immortal soul. Then I began to long for the sort of "poetic immortality" one finds in the Iliad or in Shakespearean sonnets, of being remembered & heroized after one's death; I decided that would be almost as good. Of course I realized later that, even if my own meagre achievements were somehow to merit such immortality, that history forgets, & even if it remembers, the human race won't be around until the end of the universe, & even if it is, they say universe itself won't last forever. So for several years now I've contented myself that even though I won't always be, or even be always remembered, I can still say "I will always have been." That's almost as good. But now I've been reading some of Goedel's letters & some modern-day philosophers of physics, & something very alarming springs to mind. If space & time are a unity, it stands to reason that since spatial positions are ordered only relationally (and not in priority or sequence; there being no absolute position or direction) that might well be true of temporal positions also. I even read an analysis of philosophical implications for phenomena in quantum physics which suggested that the best way to conceive of the Young experiment, & Heisenberg, & other such, is that the present or future actually influences & may even determine the past few microseconds! If the past isn't eternally fixed, then someday not just I, but things that actually matter, too, like poetry and math; heroism & ecstasy - will not only "cease to be" (I am resigned to that) but may someday never have existed at all! Dread over this possibility is tormenting me; I'm eating my whole weltanschauung from the inside out worrying about it. Please let me know if I'm still in the clear or if I've got to somehow part with even this little thing I still permit myself to believe & reconceptualize everything from the ground up. You have my profound gratitude for any insight you might shed on this issue. Earnestly, 'Bastian R.
Allen Stairs
March 20, 2008
(changed March 20, 2008)
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You've raised lots of issues, but I wanted to single out one in particular. You seemed particularly worried by the possibility that there might be some sort of influence from present to past. The worry seemed to be that if someone did the wrong sort of monkeying around now or in the future, your... Read more