Brief Argument for Objective Values
I read this in Stephen R.L. Clark’s God, Religion and Reality. It seems to me to be a sound reason to believe in objective values:
If there are no objective values then there are no facts (since there’s nothing that we ought to believe). There are facts, therefore there are objective values.
Any claim that there are no facts (nothing that we ought to believe) can be met with the questions, “Is that a fact? Ought we to believe that?” and so on to infinity.
Thoughts?
If there are no objective values then there are no facts (since there’s nothing that we ought to believe). There are facts, therefore there are objective values.
Any claim that there are no facts (nothing that we ought to believe) can be met with the questions, “Is that a fact? Ought we to believe that?” and so on to infinity.
Thoughts?
Comments (305)
?? Facts aren't conventionally defined as "things we ought to believe." Many people do feel that we ought to believe facts, but that's not what a fact IS. Facts are ways that the world happens to be. States of affairs.
This strikes me as a comment that I can't even believe would be published, because the author seems extremely confused.
Would you say the above is a fact? And would you say we ought to believe it? Is there anything we ought to believe? If you say no to the last two questions, ought we to believe that?
It goes on forever. It seems to me you’re forced to admit there are things we ought to believe and that those things are facts, unless someone can explain where I’m going wrong.
It doesn't go on forever. "Fact" does NOT refer to "thing we ought to believe," Period. If one feels that we ought to believe facts, that's fine. But "thing we ought to believe" is not what a fact is. (And you wouldn't say "We ought to believe things we ought to believe" instead of "we ought to believe facts" would you?)
It's like saying that "automobile" refers to "Thing we ought to periodically change the oil for." Or that "dog" refers to "Thing we ought to take outside for a walk."
Would you say that there are no dogs if there are no things we ought to take outside for a walk?
You’re not actually understanding what I’m saying, and you’ve done that partial quote thing again where you miss off an important part of my reply.
If anyone else has something to say then cool, otherwise I guess I can continue believing it’s a sound argument.
Do you understand the difference between what "fact" refers to and what "thing we ought to believe" refers to?
It's important that you can grasp something so basic.
I’m saying there are things we ought to believe, we ought to believe them because they’re true, and that true things are facts.
That's fine, but it doesn't have anything to do with the problem with the argument you presented.
The argument you presented went like this:
"If there are no objective values then there are no facts (since there’s nothing that we ought to believe). "
That only works if:
(1) Objective values and facts are supposedly the same thing, or
(2) "Things we ought to believe" and facts are supposedly the same thing
OR, if
(3) "If there's a fact, then necessarily it has objective value" is true, or
(4) "If there's a fact, then necessarily there's something we ought to believe" is true
(1) and (2) are not conventional definitions of "fact." As unconventional definitions, that could work, though it would be vacuous (as a tautology--"There is no x if there's no x") and it wouldn't have any rhetorical weight, because the rhetorical weight of the argument is gained by appealing to the conventional sense of "fact."
Re (3) and (4), there's zero argument for them. The argument would have to argue for one or both of those claims.
Number 2. I think it is a tautology. If the conventional sense of fact is “something that is true”, and we ought to believe true things, then it follows that facts are things we ought to believe. So there’s at least something that we ought to do, an objective value, to believe facts.
That's not (2) it's (4). (2) would be "The conventional sense of 'fact' is thing we ought to believe."
"and we ought to believe true things" is saying (4), that it's necessarily the case that we ought to believe facts.
In other words, you're not saying that the definition of fact is "thing we ought to believe." You're saying that it follows from something being a fact that we ought to believe it.
But claiming that something follows requires an argument.
By the way, does it follow from a fact that we ought to believe it if humans had never appeared?
Can we not have facts in the absence of humans?
Did I not give an argument? The one you only partially quoted?
P1: Facts are true things.
P2: We ought to believe true things.
C: We ought to believe facts.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Yes, that’s what makes them objectively true, which is why we ought to believe them.
Sigh--there's no argument for P2. P2 needs an argument.
(I don't agree with P1, either, by the way. That's not what a fact is. But what's more important at the moment is that P2 would require an argument. As it is, it's just coming out of nowhere. It doesn't follow from anything.)
Buddy, if you weren’t so bloody obtuse you’d have realised I addressed in my OP the absurdity of claiming that that facts aren’t things we ought to believe. I can ask the questions, “Is that true? Is that a fact? Ought we believe that?” to infinity.
Obtuse? this is as simple and straightforward as we can get while still doing philosophy.
Imagine the following. Someone gives this argument:
P1: Facts are true things.
P2: We ought not to believe true things.
C: We ought not to believe facts.
Are there any problems with that argument?
I know it is mate. That’s why I’m calling you obtuse. Try looking the word up.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Yes. It’s an argument that fails if it’s true.
I should say it’s self-defeating. Because if it’s true that we ought not to believe true things, then we ought not to believe that we ought not to believe true things.
So it’s actually a paradox, right?
And so the absurdity of your premise 2 was actually my point, you’ve made it again for me.
This could be resolved if we just eliminated the word "believe" from the English language.
Obviously AJJ is using that word in one of its least desirable, least useful, idiosyncratic forms.
Just sayin'!
Believe it or not, I wasn’t interested in having this type of argument. If there’s a clear objection to the argument in my original post, I would love to here it. So, please could you explain your comment, rather than simply assert it with a “Just sayin’!” on the end.
Terrapin has been attempting to do that...to little avail, AJJ.
What do you mean when you use the word "believe" the way you did in the OP?
I already gave you the clear objection. Facts in no way generally hinge on us or anything about us. There would be facts if we never existed. If we never existed, there's obviously nothing we ought to believe. But there are still facts.
No mate. Here’s what you said:
Quoting Frank Apisa
So you should first of all explain that. And...
Quoting Frank Apisa
You should explain how I was using the word, since you’ve claimed to know, and then explain what the correct way to use it is, in your view.
I know mate. Again: that is what makes them objective, rather than subjective. That is why we ought to believe them.
Quoting Terrapin Station
You’re just getting objective and subjective mixed up here. Whether facts ought to be believed or not doesn’t depend on us if they’re objective.
AJJ...I think even you do not know how you were using it.
A fact...IS A FACT.
You do not have to do any "believing." It just is.
IF matter actually exists (it may not)...then it exists whether we humans "believe" it or not.
In any case...when you used the word "believe" in the OP...
...did you mean it the way it is used in any of these examples of the word being used?
a) I "believe" I will take a shit before heading out to the golf course.
b) I "believe" you are just fucking with my head with all that "altruism" nonsense.
c) I "believe" (in) God.
d) Do you "believe" in flying saucers.
e) "Believe" me...this is going to hurt me more that it is going to hurt you.
f) I "believe" he was lying when he said he loved me.
g) I "believe" that mother-fucker would kill me before he would ever concede I was right about that thing.
h) If you "believe" everything and anything is possible.
g) You gotta "believe" or you will never make it to the top.
I could go on and on and on and on...but that is enough for now.
[i]If there are no objective values then there are no facts (since there’s nothing that we ought to believe). There are facts, therefore there are objective values.
Any claim that there are no facts (nothing that we ought to believe) can be met with the questions, “Is that a fact? Ought we to believe that?” and so on to infinity.[/i]
So...how did you mean it when you used the word "believe" the first time in that OP?
And how did you mean it when you used it the second time?
And how did you mean it when you used it the third time?
Like any of the list (a) to (g) above?
What is the relation of facts to values and beliefs?
It is a fact that I am sitting on my deck typing this on my laptop. I do not hold objective values (another fact) but that does not change the fact that I am sitting here typing this. I can think of no reason why you ought to believe that fact and see no value one way or another whether you accept that fact. Whatever your values are, whether you consider them to be objective or subjective, that does not change the fact that I am doing what I said I am doing.
Facts, factual claims, and claims regarding what I ought to believe are three different things. Since facts do not depend on whether of not I believe them, and since there are countless facts I may never know anything about, the claim that I ought to believe them is questionable. Factual claims may be false and so it is a questionable claim that I ought to believe them. And since we cannot always discern the difference between facts and factual claims, the claim that we ought to believe is problematic, as is often the case when with religious and moral claims dressed up not simply as factual claims but as facts.
So imagine there are no people. There are facts, of course. What would make it an objective fact in that situation that those facts ought to be believed by people?
I will mention that I googled this book and looked at the Amazon preview, and that I think it looks a good book.
However I suspect that the peremptory way in which you've summarised this point might not do justice to the argument, if there is one. It's more a play on words.
It might actually help to reproduce the famous passage in which David Hume articulates the 'is/ought' problem:
Underline added. Notice that, in keeping with Hume's overall philosophy, he is questioning whether on the basis of the understanding the 'distinction of vice and virtue' can be considered grounded in fact; for, he says, it is not discernable in the relations of objects, nor perceivable, like deductive proofs, on the basis of reason. This set out the 'is/ought' problem which has occupied subsequent philosophy.
I think the key point that this throws into relief is the problematic nature of such ideas as 'objective morality' or 'moral facts'. It is actually at the crux of many debates about the relationship of science and ethics. For example. behaviourism and positivism both want to give an account of human activities without any recourse to beliefs or moral stances. Others say that moral stances are perfectly fine, but that they're fundamentally personal, social or civic; that they're grounded in evolutionary biology; and so on. That leads to the kinds of moral relativism and subjectivism which is the de facto philosophy of secular culture.
I suppose for a theist to argue otherwise, there has to be a compelling argument for the reality of a value system and so some real grounding for the ethical stance, other than the personal, social or biological. It's hard to see how you can get from objective facts to that perspective, and I don't think the one-sentence 'argument' given above does the job (even though I personally believe that there is a real basis for ethical stances.)
Thanks for the cordial replies. I’ll try to respond to both here.
Facts don’t depend on whether or not we believe them, sure, but I don’t see how that has a bearing on whether we ought to believe them. Neither do I see what bearing all the facts we do not know has on this, since it can simply be the case that we ought to believe once aware of them. And how we come to know facts is a separate issue. The reason I agree with the OP argument is that it seems absurd to deny that facts are things that we ought to believe, for the reason described in the OP and my other posts.
Really the key is that last point. We ought to believe facts because it’s absurd to say either that we ought not to believe facts (which creates a paradox), or that facts aren’t things we ought to believe (which creates an infinite regress until you accept that there are things we ought to believe - which are true things, which are facts).
If for those reasons facts are things we ought to believe, then you have there a basis and proof for objective values.
It has a bearing, because not accepting facts has consequences. If you're an engineer, and you measure something wrongly, or enter a wrong value, then your bridge will collapse. It has nothing to do with belief - belief doesn't even come into it. And I don't know if 'accepting a fact' is the same as believing that such and such is the case; matters of empirical fact are simply thus, whether you believe it or not.
I suppose you can say that you ought to accept facts on the basis that not accepting facts has deleterious consequences. But I still don't see much of an argument here. Should I cheat in this exam? Should I take that office stationary for my own use? Should I give this stranger a ride? These are all questions which involve what you ought or ought not to do, but which don't necessarily resolve neatly to matters of fact. You can't say that as a matter of fact, you should never pick up strangers; a lot depends on the circumstances. And there are innumerable such instances in day to day life.
Your bridge example is a practical illustration of why it is we ought to believe facts, but I’m simply saying we ought to believe facts because they’re true, because it’s absurd to say otherwise. In practice the things we believe may or may not actually be facts, but I’m talking abstractly - that it is abstractly the case that we ought to believe facts.
Quoting Wayfarer
This key point keeps being passed over:
It is absurd to say facts are not things we ought to believe. Because every denial invites the question, “Well ought we to believe that? Ought we to believe that facts are not things we ought to believe? If the answer is no, well ought we to believe that? And so on. It’s really just this I’m appealing to to demonstrate that facts definitely are things we ought to believe, because we ought to believe true things, which are facts.
Bottom of 108 to 109
Well, I care. You could swap “believe” for “accept” and it seems to me the argument works the same.
Not really, and maintain rational integrity. Acceptance is analytic, insofar as that which is accepted is self-sufficient (accepted because it’s a fact). Belief is synthetic, insofar as there remains a contingency to the proposition which some additional proposition would need to rectify (if one does not believe the fact he should be able to justify his dissention).
To go a step further, acceptance grants that some particular cause and effect are empirically manifest, the primary conditions for facts in general. If one believes he ought not to accept some fact, by association he does not grant that particular cause and effect to be at least sufficient, and at most he does not grant those conditions to be possible and/or non-contradictory.
Much more parsimonious to either accept facts as facts or not, and leave such vagaries as “ought to believe” by the metaphysical wayside.
It’s absurd to deny that we ought to take facts
to be true, whether that means believing or accepting, for the reason I gave in my OP.
Quoting Mww
I don’t see how whether we think something is a fact or not has any bearing on the abstract notion that we ought to believe/accept facts.
Quoting Mww
Again, swap “believe” for “accept” and the argument works the same. If you deny that we ought to accept facts, it invites the question, “Well ought we to accept that?” and so on until it’s accepted that we ought to accept true things, which are facts.
If you’re simply saying you don’t care about that, then OK.
The first thing that strikes me about this is the word "ought". "Ought" says that there's some kind of reason or compulsion that requires us to believe this thing. I think other respondents have already commented that a fact (in the context of this discussion) simply reflects something in the world that is. There is no ought here; what is, is.
The next thing is not going to be welcome to many readers :wink:, which is what you mean by "objective"? Without getting too involved, can we agree that "objective" refers directly to that which is? That it refers directly to an accurate correspondence with Objective Reality?
If that's an acceptable working definition, then we can return to the quote you gave us. There are objective values because Objective Reality exists. Any accurate observation of (some aspect of) Objective Reality gives rise to one or more facts. So yes, there is an Objective Reality, there are objective values, and there are facts.
But isn't this quite basic stuff when it comes to debating objectivity? Is there anything contentious here, apart, perhaps, from the words/terms used to express the concepts? Have I missed something deep and meaningful? :chin:
I agree that there could be no objective values without facts, but we cannot derive "if there are no objective values then there are no facts" from this. That would be some sort of inversion fallacy. "If there are no facts, then there are no objective values" is not convertible to "if there are not objective values then there are no facts".
It is probably the case that objective values are dependent on facts, and that's why I agree with that, but as the others point out, facts are not dependent on objective values. We do not say that X is a fact because it is what we ought to believe, we say that we ought to believe X because it is a fact. This leaves the issue of why we ought to believe facts as unanswered, and unaddressed, so we cannot conclude that because there are facts there are objective values.
Quoting AJJ
Saying that it is absurd to say otherwise does not resolve the issue. We need to say something about "ought" which demonstrates that we ought to believe facts. "Ought" refers to what is good, so we need to show that it is always good to believe facts to make the inductive conclusion, and the consequent proposition, that it is good to believe facts. There is still a problem with this approach though, and that is that what is good, therefore what we ought to do, goes far beyond believing facts. There are many things which we ought to do which cannot be described as "believing facts". So it is a mistake to define "ought" in this way, which limits it to believing facts.
You've hit upon an important issue here, what is commonly referred to as the noble lie. This is introduced in Plato's Republic. The noble lie is an instance of the rulers lying to the ruled, for their own good. If we accept the noble lie as a valid moral principle, then we deny the inductive principle that we ought to believe facts. Many would argue that the particular noble lie expressed by Plato is wrong, but it may be argued still, that sometimes it is better for a person not to know the truth. And this indicates that "ought" goes beyond "truth".
The only part of your argument that's being questioned is the "ought"! Ought says there's a reason to believe facts. What is that reason? Above, you seem to be saying that, because facts are true, we ought to believe them. This implies someone or something 'out there' who/which somehow compels us to believe. There is no active someone or something; there is only (! :smile:) that which is. There is no need for further justification. Agreement with that which is cannot be challenged or doubted. So there is no ought, only that which is.
If it is the case that facts are things we ought to believe, then the OP argument works. The reason I’ve given that it is the case that we ought to believe facts is that it’s absurd to deny it, because you continually invite the question, “Well ought we believe that?”
You can do the same thing with “good”. Is it good to believe facts? If you say no, then you continually invite the question, “Well is it good to believe that?”
As to the noble lie, it might be the case that the lie is beneficial, in which case we ought to believe that it’s beneficial. However, that doesn’t mean we ought to believe the lie if we know it to be one.
It has a bearing because there can be a fact where "we ought to believe it" is not the case, which makes the argument invalid logically. An example is where (when) no people exist.
First, "Continually inviting a question" is sufficient for "absurd"? What definition of "absurd" are you using, then, and what does it have to do with logical validity?
What you seem to be shooting for is a variation on the old "objective truth" argument chestnut . . . which doesn't at all work. You seem to be thinking that if someone says "P is a fact" ( where we're ignoring that facts aren't propositions, they're not things that people say, etc.), then necessarily they're implying not only "You ought to believe that P," but "It's true that you ought to believe that P," or "It's a fact that you ought to believe that P." But that's not the case. No normative (no ought/should/ought not/should not/etc.) is true or is a fact (both factually and in my view). Normatives are ways that people feel about what people should ideally do/be like.
Here’s the definition from my Dictionary app: “utterly or obviously senseless, illogical, or untrue; contrary to all reason or common sense; laughably foolish or false”
The rest is just you asserting your own credo and I don’t care about that.
So in what way does "Continually inviting a question" fit the definition of "absurd" you're using?
Because you’re in effect saying “there is nothing that we ought to believe, including the proposition that there is nothing we ought to believe.”
So the issue isn't continually inviting a question, but something else.
Re your comment here, if we're saying that it's not true, it's not a fact, that there is anything that we ought to believe, why is that absurd? How does it fit your definition of absurd?
The issue is continually inviting the question, which in effect makes a senseless statement, the one I just gave.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Because it invites the question, “Ought we believe that there isn’t anything we ought to believe?” It’s like I’ve said, this question is continually invited, which in effect makes the senseless statement I gave in my previous post.
If the issue is "continually inviting a question," then continually inviting a question should be absurd regardless of the question, for any argument.
If the issue is the content of the question, then that's different.
The other option would be that the issue is continually inviting a question of x type, in which case neither (a) continually inviting a question nor (b) inviting (but not continually) a question of x type would be sufficient to be absurd.
At any rate . . .
Quoting AJJ
Rather than dealing with the plethora of other problems there, let's stick to this: In telling me why it's absurd per the definition you used, you should appeal to a term that's in the definition you used. You're not doing that.
I was using the word insensible rather than senseless. My mistake.
Senseless vs not senseless literally?--as in, involving our senses?
As in nonsensical.
Haha--as if that removes the ambiguity.
Try it this way. Is there a way to not simply be making a value judgment about it (about the question, or alternately phrased, the claim that we're talking about--that it's neither true nor a fact that we ought to believe anything)?
If it's simply a value judgment, then that's what you're hinging a logical argument on? (Or hinging a claim of invalidity on?)
Yeah, I think we should part ways now in this argument. I don’t want to discuss this with anyone who can’t see why the below statement makes no sense:
Quoting AJJ
But that is not the apologist game Clark is playing. He wants us to believe that Christian values are objective values and ought to be believed because they are based on facts.
How about trying to support how it would be a fact (of what? what would it be a property of? etc.) that we ought or ought not do anything?
("I'm claiming that it's a fact that if P is a fact, then it follows that we ought to believe that P, and if you don't agree, then I think I should just ignore you, because you're speaking nonsense" isn't a very good argument, by the way.)
But it's not absurd to deny that facts are what we ought to believe, as the example of the noble lie demonstrates. It is arguable that in some cases it's for the person's own good to believe a lie. If that's the case, then it's not the facts which ought to be believed. We ought to believe what is good for us to believe, regardless of the facts.
Quoting AJJ
This is what's absurd. It's not the lie itself which is beneficial it's the belief in the lie which is beneficial. The lie would be useless if no one believed it. If the people know that it is a lie, then they will not believe it, regardless of whether they ought to believe it or not.
1. If there are no objective values then there are no facts
2. There are facts
So,
3. There are objective values
I don't agree with premise 1 because it asserts that without objective values there can be no facts. It needs to be proved.
But then it seems to me it isn’t that we ought to believe the lie, but rather that we ought to behave in the way that the lie facilitates. If you consider the lie and the truth abstractly then it seems obvious that we ought to believe the truth over the lie. If you answer that we ought sometimes to believe the lie, then that demonstrates that the ought doesn’t reside in believing the lie, but in the consequent actions of believing the lie. If you try to say the same thing about the truth, you’re making the statement that true things are not things we ought to believe, which lands you in that same bottomless question pit I’ve been talking about.
I can't make out what you are trying to say. If a certain belief leads to good actions, then why can't we conclude that we ought to hold that belief?
You insist that we ought to believe the truth, but why? Unless there is a good which comes from believing the truth, which is better than the good which comes from believing the lie, then this claim is unfounded. Do you have a principle whereby it is demonstrated that believing the truth is always better than believing a lie?
I don't see the bottomless pit. The bottom is what is good. You want to make the bottom the truth. Clearly these two are not equivalent, so why do you give supremacy to truth over good? I give supremacy to good because human beings are active beings, involved in doing things, activity is the natural tendency for the human being and to be sedentary is unhealthy. Therefore I assume that beliefs are for the sake of these activities which we engage in, and the beliefs which we ought to hold are the ones which are conducive to good actions. If a true belief is conducive to good actions then it is one that we ought to hold. If it is not, then there is no reason to hold it. And if a false belief is conducive to good actions, then it ought to be held.
A belief needs to be judged in relation to something in order to determine whether or not we ought to hold it. Being fallible human beings, with fallible minds, we have no guarantee that what we think is the truth is really the truth, so we cannot judge our beliefs in relation to the truth. Therefore we need to judge whether or not we ought to hold this or that belief in relation to something other than the truth. I think that we ought to judge the beliefs in relation to the actions which they bring about, whether they bring about good or bad activities.
I’m saying the ought resides in the actions, and not the belief in the lie. It would be possible to take the same actions without believing the lie, so believing the lie isn’t strictly necessary. It might appear necessary in practice, but there’s certainly no ought to believing the lie in the abstract. As I said, this shows the ought does not reside in believing the lie, like I’m saying in does in the truth.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Is it even possible for bad things to come from believing the truth? Can you give an example of this? If the truth of a nearby exploding volcano causes people to panic and run over one another, then it’s not believing the truth that has lead to this, but the implicit lie that it is good to panic and run over one another.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What is true is good. I’ve already said you can form the same bottomless pit with “good”. Is it good to believe true things? No? Well is it good to believe that?. And so on. Eventually you’re forced to say yes, because it’s good to believe true things, and we ought to do things that are good.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We always judge our beliefs in relation to the truth, it’s impossible to do otherwise. By saying, “I’m taking this action not because I’m certain it’s true, but because good will come of it”, you’re actually saying, “I’m taking this action because I believe it is true that good will come of it, and we ought to believe true things.”
I don't recognize how this would be possible. Actions are determined as necessary in relation to particular ends. The end is the belief, of what is required. So, we have a belief of what is needed and we tailor our actions toward that belief. We can consider different possible actions for fulfilling the same belief. However, the action, as required for the belief, is contingent on the belief. So it really doesn't seem possible to come up with the same action without the same belief as to what is required. If we change the belief, the contingent actions will change accordingly. How do you suggest that we could change the belief of what is required, and still come up with the same action as being required for the new belief.
Quoting AJJ
I'm not talking about where bad things come from, I'm talking about where good things come from. So this question is irrelevant. If good things are the things which are desired, as needed, then we ought to tailor our beliefs such that they naturally bring about good things. If, in the process of judging a particular belief, the possibility that it might bring about something bad comes up, then we need to consider this. But we start from a good, what is needed, and until believing the truth is demonstrated as something needed, or good, truth has no relevance.
Quoting AJJ
You don't seem to be grasping the principle. Truth is good and good is truth, is a bottomless pit, because it's circular. To avoid the circle (bottomless pit) we need to ground something. So we ground "good" in action, activity. Activities are things which bring about real change in the world. "Truth" does not do the same thing, it doesn't bring about any activities, or change in the world. The person knowing what is good will be inspired to act, to bring about the good, while the person knowing the truth would be sedentary without a sense of what is good. It's good to believe X, because X belief inspires one to act, and this creates change which is believed to be good. But we cannot say this about "truth". Knowing the truth does not necessitate any particular actions. So we cannot say that it's good to know the truth until we can say what good the truth brings about. However, we can say that a certain belief is good, because it brings about good actions, regardless of whether or not it is true.
Quoting AJJ
This is not true at all. Our beliefs regarding actions are based in probability. We proceed when there is a high probability of success, not when we are certain that it is true that there will be success.
Well, and also we need to observe the difference between:
(1) It's true that that we ought to believe facts
(2) It's a fact that we ought to believe fact
(3) One (and maybe everyone, or close to it) has the disposition that we ought to believe facts
Those are all saying something different.
(3) may very well be the case. Maybe almost everyone has that disposition, for most facts at least, but that can be the case while we deny both (1) and (2). AJJ is trying to assert (1) and/or (2).
Lots of contributors to this topic are using the term "ought" over and over. Fair enough. But, given your use(s) of "ought", can you please clarify what the associated reason(s) is/are?
For example, if we ought to believe facts, why ought we? What is the reason?
[I'm not arguing that we shouldn't believe facts, I'm asking why we ought to believe them.]
If you're looking on Amazon (re their "Look Inside" feature), here's a trick that often works. The "Look Inside" books have a search feature. Utilizing that, you can either search for a relatively uncommon word that you know is in the passage in question, or you can search for a very common word, such as "the," if you know the page number you need. You'll get results of all of the occurrences of the word in question in the book, and when you click on the page number you need, or a page right before or after it (sometimes it takes some educated guesswork via referencing the table of contents or index, which are usually part of the preview), you'll be able to see that section even though it wasn't part of the preview.
That worked for me in this case.
If I’m lied to and told there is no erupting volcano but I need to leave the area for some other innocuous reason, then I won’t panic and run over people. But neither will I panic and run over people if I’ve learned that this is something I shouldn’t do anyway. The ought resides in the action/non-action, not in believing the lie.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And I was saying that bad things cannot come from truth, but they obviously can from lies. Therefore it cannot ever be bad to believe the truth, but it can be bad to believe lies, so an ought cannot ever reside in believing lies, but it can do so in the truth.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And all the time you’re doing this you are appealing to the truth; the truth of what is good, and whether or not good will come of a certain belief or an action. Why do we appeal to these truths if it is not good to do so, if it’s not the case that we ought to?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I think you have this backwards. Action is grounded in the good. How else would we choose our actions, if not in reference to the good, or at least what we perceive the good is? And it’s not a circle to say that truth and goodness are the same thing, to say that good things are true things and true things are good things. Truth/goodness are the ground you mentioned, not action, which is based on our perception of these things.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I just don’t think you’ve thought about this. Of course knowing the truth necessitates action. The only way it wouldn’t would be if it were true that we should never take any actions.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, you just haven’t thought about this. The only way we can judge something to be probable is in reference to the truth that it is probable.
You just bent the facts under consideration into a very strange shape, so that they will resemble your thesis. Wouldn't it be better simply to express the facts in a clear and understandable fashion? :chin:
I don’t know what you’re struggling with. We can only judge that a coin has a 50/50 chance of landing on tails by referring to the mathematical truth that this is the case. If there was no truth to refer to, you couldn’t possible have any idea of the outcome.
Apparently not. I'm observing that you have ordered your words in a peculiar way, one that is not easy to understand, so that they would resemble the theme you wish to promote. Look:
Quoting AJJ
This is not a normal or helpful way of saying "we can only know something if it's true". And I wonder what is the point of saying so? Isn't it the sort of thing we usually take for granted? Is there a reason to say it explicitly? Are you soon going to inform us that we can only be "X" if it's true that we are "X"?
It was said that we do not judge our beliefs in relation to the truth, but base them on probability. I said that we can only judge something to be probable by referring to the truth that it is, i.e. by judging in relation to the truth.
Saying that it's a fact that there's a 50/50 probability that a coin lands on heads or tails is saying that coin flips really are random . . . which is not believed to be the case. What is rather commonly believed to be the case is that coin flips are too hard to predict, because the variables are so fine-grained/subtle--having to do with slight differences in the force applied, plus air movement and pressure, plus miniscule variations in the composition of the coin (as well as dirt etc. on the surface), and so on. The probability reflects an epistemic gap, not a simple ontological fact.
The point I made though, is that the action comes about as a result of the belief. If the reason for leaving is innocuous, then you will not see the need to leave, and you will not necessarily leave. So the example doesn't bring to the discussion what you want it to bring.
Quoting AJJ
As I said, this is irrelevant if not actually false, because what is important is bringing about good things. Bad things may come about, at any time or place, and knowing the truth cannot prevent them, just like inaction cannot prevent bad things. So unless you establish a relationship between "good" (which is what inspires one to act) and "true", then whether or not bad things can come about from knowing the truth is completely irrelevant to preventing bad things, or bringing about good things.
Quoting AJJ
This is not the case. We act when we believe good will come from the action. In no way am I claiming that we act when we think that we know the truth about what is good. This is what I said about actions being based in the probability of success, not in the certainty of truth or falsity.
Quoting AJJ
Ugly fallacious logic. It is not true that we should never take any actions. Therefore we should take action now.
You need to explain how knowing the truth necessitates action.
Quoting AJJ
And I said that this is normally taken for granted. Does it really need stating, even here, in the midst of a debate in a philosophy forum? I suspect not.
I understand our actions are based on our beliefs. I understand you as saying that this means it can be the case that we ought to believe certain lies. I’m saying that it isn’t that we ought to believe the lies, but that we ought to act in the way the lie facilitates. My example illustrated this; you’re just being a pedant.
We ought to believe what is true, since believing what is true leads to doing good anyway, unless you can give an example where this wouldn’t be the case, where believing the truth would lead to doing wrong.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We act when we believe it is true that good will come of the action. We appeal to the truth. Why do we appeal to the truth? Because we ought to, because it is good to do so. Your third sentence there contradicts the second; to believe that good will come from an action is to think you know the truth about what is good. You’ll have to quote where I said anything about certainty in regard to choosing our actions; what I’ve said is that when we choose our actions we appeal to the truth, or our perception of it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Say we know it is true that we ought to be kind to others. This necessitates that we be kind to others, otherwise we would not be abiding by the truth. It makes no sense to say we don’t need to abide by the truth, because if that statement is true, then we don’t need to abide by that either.
What? I explain the context of my remark, you quote my remark back to me without the context. I was responding to a statement that denied what you rightly acknowledge as the obvious.
Aye, well maybe it is true mate, but don’t worry about it. No one is going to force you to be a Christian.
As I explained, your example failed, and I still don't think that what you claim is possible. Our actions are tailored to our beliefs, the actions are designed to bring about what is believed. I really do not see how it is possible to change the belief and expect that the different belief would bring about the same action. You seem to believe that this could be done, but your example did not show it.
Quoting AJJ
I gave you my example, one could believe what is true, and still be sedentary. Therefore believing what is true does not necessarily lead to doing good actions. Doing wrong is irrelevant because one could not do what is good without doing wrong, simply by being inactive. Being inactive is neither doing good nor doing wrong.
Quoting AJJ
This is false, and I went through it already. When I proceed with a project, a plan, I believe that there is a high probability that I will be successful, and that good will come from the procedure. When I start the procedure I do not believe that it is true that good will come from the action because I have respect for the fact that failure is possible, there could be an accident, and harm could come from the procedure instead.
If you really believe that you ought to believe the truth, you should have respect for this. When judging whether or not to proceed with an action, we often consult truths to aid us in the judgement, but there is no truth to whether or not the action will be successful, prior to carrying out the action, and to believe that there is is to believe a falsity.
Quoting AJJ
There's no contradiction. Do you recognize the difference between saying "X is probably the case", and "it is true that X is the case". When I believe that my action will be successful, and I have the confidence to proceed, I do not believe "it is true that my action will be successful", I believe "my action will probably be successful".
It is you who is being pedantic, trying to restrict the use of "believe" to truth. So you claim "I believe I will be successful" means "I believe it is true that I will be successful". But believing does not necessarily imply truth, as your pedantic ways suggest. It sometimes means to have faith and confidence, and this is the case when we believe in the success of our actions. When we believe in our actions, we have faith in our ability to judge, and confidence that the good will come from the action. Truth is not relevant here.
Quoting AJJ
Do you not see the unwarranted jump which you are making here? You are jumping from knowing or believing the truth to "abiding by the truth". Knowing the truth does not make one abide by the truth. People often know what they ought to do, yet act in a contrary way, like when they knowingly break the law. This is what I've been trying to tell you, knowing the truth does not inspire one to act well, it is something else which inspires morality. And this is why the inspiration to be moral must take priority over the inspiration to know the truth
That is not the point. You said:
Quoting AJJ
It it not a matter of whether I or anyone else is being forced to be a Christian. It is a question about whether his argument is sound. It's not. I suppose that those who already believe what he is claiming believe that one ought to believe it but it does not hold water as a philosophical argument.
Yeah, you should be aware that at this point you’re just repeating what you think without considering what I’m saying.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, because it’s not true that we should be sedentary. If you’re dying in front of me from a heart attack then it would be wrong from me to remain sedentary, it would be true that I should help you, and therefore good for me to do so.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is to say you take it as true there could be an accident, but that you also take it as true that it could work out. You believe that good could come from the action. My use of “will” rather than “could” should not have indicated certainty to you. To believe something isn’t to be certain of it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You’ll have to quote where I actually said that. I’ve been saying that we judge our actions in relation to the truth, or our perception of it. That doesn’t mean we check the truth to see if the action will definitely be successful or not, but that we judge its goodness and likelihood of success by reference to our understanding of the truth.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
To believe that good will (or might) come from something is to believe you know the truth about what good is, otherwise how would you have any idea that good will come from something? It doesn’t seem to me that what you’ve said there challenges this.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
To have faith in something is to have faith that it is true. To have confidence in something is to have confidence that it is true. This isn’t pedantry, it’s pointing out the obvious.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We can only be moral if we first know the truth about what is moral. Knowing the truth about what is moral absolutely does inspire us to be moral, according to our understanding. When someone acts in way contrary to what is moral, they are acting on the implicit lie that it is not actually contrary to what is moral to do what they’re doing. Have you not recognised the way we justify our actions to ourselves? Have you ever justified an action by appealing to its wrongness? Where does the inspiration to be moral come from, if not from understanding the truth about what is moral?
But you haven't explained how knowing that it is true that one ought to do something leads to the person actually doing something.
Quoting AJJ
And I do not agree with that, for good reasons, as I explained.
Quoting AJJ
This is ridiculous. You are reducing confidence to a belief in truth, when in reality the confidence which is required to proceed with an action has nothing to do with the apprehension of truth. If an action worked for me in the past, I will proceed with it again. I may even develop a habit. I am proceeding with the action to bring about what I perceive as a good, not because I believe that I know the truth about what good is.
Quoting AJJ
Again, this is ridiculous. If you want to reduce the faith and confidence which is required for the actions of an animal such as a human being, to a matter of believing that something is true, then that's your own business. But if you are inclined toward understand the truth about what motivates animals to act, and what produces the faith and courage required for such acts, you would be wise to dismiss this premise as faulty.
Quoting AJJ
We teach children to act properly when they are far too young to understand the "truth about what is moral". Only at a much later age, if they study philosophy, will they come to understand about what it is to be moral. So it is very clearly untrue that we must understand the truth about what is moral, before we can be moral. In reality we learn to act morally long before we understand the truth about what it means to be moral. In fact, philosophers today continue to debate about the truth of what it means to be moral, and if they are respectable philosophers they recognize that the truth about what it is to be moral has not yet been uncovered.
I know it is true that I should help you when you’re having a heart attack, therefore I help you. Like I’ve said, goodness and truth - or how we perceive them - are the basis for our actions.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, you’re just repeating what you think without considering what I’m saying. As I have explained, appealing to probability doesn’t help you. When you base a action on a probability, you are judging that probability in relation to the truth, as you perceive it, that it is probable.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And again, you’re just repeating what you think without considering what I’m saying. How can you perceive something as good without knowing -
or believing you know - what the good is?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Bald assertion mate.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In the same way that animals are not moral agents, I would say children are not either. Animals cannot murder, only kill. It’s only by understanding the immorality of killing that it can become murder.
But whatever. I’d like to ask this important question again: Where does our inspiration to be moral come from, if not from our understanding of what is moral?
Ohh! So it’s not a sound argument. It doesn’t hold water as a philosophical argument. Right, my mistake everyone, I had no idea this was so simple.
You have moved further and further away from philosophical engagement. It's that simple.
It should be noted that you have not provided anything that ought to be believed, no facts or objective values, that connect God and religion and reality. You have not shown that the claim that believing facts is a value, objective or otherwise. It really is so simple.
Aye, whatever you say mate.
At least your "argument" is getting briefer.
I was commenting on how you twisted your sentences to include 'The Truth' - an important concept, but one which is nowhere near central to the discussion going on. Not being a central issue, The Truth is (a) usually taken for granted, and (b) not really relevant to this particular discussion. But you are trying to drag it in....
I explain the context of my remark. You quote my remark back at me without the context. I explain the context again. You continue to ignore the context, and claim that the Truth is not particularly relevant to a discussion about whether we ought to believe true things, i.e. facts.
True things are propositions, not facts. Truth is a property of propositions, which on some accounts, obtain that property via corresponding to facts. (That's it the only theory about how propositions obtain truth-value, but it's one of the more popular theories.)
Facts are states of affairs, ways that the world happens to be.
Oh. I thought it was a "Brief argument for Objective Values". Not quite the same thing. And The Truth deserves and requires a topic of its own, not a derail in this one. :chin:
Quoting AJJ
This garbled statement is what we started off with. It contains so many oddities that it's difficult to know where to start. But it is not obvious from this that this topic is about The Truth. Not to me, anyway.
Yeah, the claim comes down to something like "It's a fact that we ought to believe facts" or "It's a fact that if there are facts, then there is an implication (not simply a disposition that people have) that we ought to believe those facts," and the claim is that this would somehow be the case even in a counterfactual situation, or even in a possible world, where humans never existed. The problem is that he's not bothering to argue for this. Well, at least not beyond an argument that it's nonsensical/foolish/etc. to claim otherwise.
What does this topic seek to demonstrate? That there are objective values? That Objective Reality exists? That facts exist? That the existence of objective values is dependent on the existence of facts? What? :chin:
And the bit people are getting hung up over is whether we ought to believe facts. And so this is mainly what the discussion has been about.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
“Difficult to know where to start” = “I don’t understand this and have nothing cogent to say”
No, not really. I have this to say. In fact ( :wink: ), I already said it:
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Yeah, like I said.
Whatever man. Here’s the OED’s first definition: “thing that is known or proved to be true.”
This is truly astonishing. I mean... look back over the thread mate, bloody hell.
I was just bloody answering your questions.
What I got out of it is that (a) we're assuming that (objective) facts exist, and (b) that the fact that objective facts exist is sufficient to imply that there is also a fact that we ought to believe facts, because the fact that we ought to believe facts is somehow more or less embedded in facts period.
(a) I'm fine with as a realist. (b) I don't think is obvious at all. It seems a rather outrageous claim on the face of it, actually, as we're not at all addressing how that part is supposed to basically be embedded in facts, we're not addressing how an objective "ought" could obtain period (what properties, of what, is it?), etc.
Aren't you on this site because you're interested in philosophy?
Quoting AJJ
Which has what to do with my question?
I'm asking because there are good reasons, well-accepted, with long philosophical arguments behind them, why "fact" and "truth" are used as they are in philosophy, and by extension, in the sciences. The OED definition you're quoting has a number of philosophical problems. It might capture a common way that the term is thought of colloquially, but we're supposed to be interested in and at least putatively doing something sort of like philosophy when we post here, no?
It seems to me that facts are things, and that they’re true. That’s the definition I’ve been assuming for this argument. Swapping out that definition would be to play a different game anyway; why not define “values” as “baby geese” while you’re at it, and cause the argument to fail that way? “Facts” here means “things that are true”.
In summary:
With that definition in place the argument works, as far as I’m concerned. The principle objection has been over whether we ought to believe true things. It has been claimed that we sometimes ought to believe lies. I responded that it’s not that we ought to believe the lies, but that we ought to act in the way those particular lies facilitate. On top of that I believe I have demonstrated the absurdity of denying that we ought to believe true things, because of the bottomless pit of questions that invites. There has to be something we ought to believe (does the statement “there is nothing we ought to believe” not defeat itself?), and that thing will be true and good to believe, which are the reasons we ought to believe it.
A couple of people have claimed I’ve not been supporting the argument or answering objections. It should really be obvious that’s not the case.
All you're doing here is telling me why you couldn't care less about the convention in philosophy and the sciences. Which is why I asked if you're not interested in that. I guess you're not.
You say, ignoring the summary I just gave of my reasoning.
What I was curious about was whether you're not interested in (learning (about)) philosophy.
You've already demonstrated that you're not going to listen to explanations of what's wrong with the argument at hand, or what you'd need to do in order to fix it. We've been through that already.
Aye. So facts are states of affairs. Are states of affairs not things and true?
Re "things" it depends on how you're using that term. Some people use it "technically" where they seem to use it as more or less a synonym for "object" (a la a "whole/solid to-normal-human-perspective item that could be handled/manipulated either by hand or at least by machinery"). If you're using it that way, then most facts wouldn't be things. Most facts are comprised of (dynamic) relations (of things in that sense and of other sorts of existents). But if you're using "thing" more in the vein of a variable like x, or in the vein of being describable/depictable/etc., then sure.
Re facts being true. No. They are not true. That's just the point of the standard philosophical distinction. What is true (or false) is a proposition. Not a fact. Propositions are about facts--they're claims about facts. In the most common take on it, propositions have the property of being true if the proposition corresponds to the fact it's about. Otherwise the proposition is false. Facts aren't true or false.
So states of affairs can be considered things, good. But how is that a proposition is true when it corresponds to something that is neither true or false?
Because what it refers to to be "true" is that the proposition corresponds to a fact. In other words, it "matches" the fact. The fact itself wouldn't have that property--what would it be corresponding to or matching?
It would have to be part of the objective Truth. You haven’t actually answered my question. How is that a proposition is true when it matches something that is neither true or false? You can’t just say “Because it matches”, you need a logical explanation why the match has that effect.
It is not a matter of value, that is, what one ought to believe, but of logical contradiction. If I say: "It is raining but I do not believe it is raining" then do I accept the assertion that it is raining, that is, do I accept it as a matter of fact? Doesn't the assertion that I do not believe it mean that I do not believe it is a fact that it is raining? If, however, I accept it as a matter of fact that it is raining, then what does it mean to assert that I do not believe it, if not that I do not accept it as a matter of fact? It may be a fact that it is raining and a fact that I do not believe that it is raining, but to assert both at the same time is absurd.
[Note: "I do not not believe it" as it is used here does not mean that one believes it but finds it hard to believe.]
That is absurd, but I don’t see what bearing this has on the OP argument. It seems to me that if you asserted both those things you’d simply be lying about at least one.
The point is, once again, that it has nothing to do with "objective values" and what one "ought to believe". The problem is not axiological but logical. Facts are not a matter of what we "ought to believe". What we ought to believe is not a matter of fact.
That’s precisely what is under discussion mate. You can’t just assert your own view and expect that to convince anyone.
On correspondence theory, "The cat is on the mat" (a proposition, which we're denoting by putting it in quotation marks) matches the cat being on the mat (the state of affairs that the cat is on the mat).
We are naming that relationship "truth," or we're naming the property of having that relationship "being true." We could have named it something else--"sploof" or "wikwak" or whatever sound we want to make. The sound we're using is "truth/true."
So how it is that a proposition is true when it matches something that's not true (or false) is that "true" is what we're naming that matching.
You’re giving “the matching” the name “true” there, not the proposition.
Yes, the matching is what's true (on correspondence theory). The matching is a property of proposition. In other words, the proposition matches the fact due to the content/structure of the proposition.
You have not understood the problem of Moore's paradox. It is not axiological but logical. That is not simply my view. If you think this is not correct then identify the value judgment that is contained in it.
It can be clearly demonstrated that facts are not dependent on beliefs. Otherwise the claim that one ought to believe facts makes no sense. It can also be clearly demonstrated that the acceptance of facts is independent of judgments of value. People starve whether I believe it or like it or not.
Is the claim that we ought to believe facts a belief or a fact? Beliefs may or may not be true, but a fact cannot be false, otherwise it would not be a fact even though it may be believed to be a fact. But whether it is a fact or not cannot be determined by belief, otherwise it would both be a fact and not a fact since some might accept it as a fact and others not.
Right.
So facts are states of affairs, and are neither true nor false. But then if it’s a fact that the cat is sitting on the mat, then we must say that it is neither true nor false that the cat is sitting on the mat. How then is it even possible for a proposition to match this fact? It neither is, nor is not the case that the cat is on the mat.
The fact is neither true nor false. A proposition about the fact is true or false. Propositions are the sorts of things you say, such as "The cat is sitting on the mat." The way it's possible for the proposition to match is that the proposition has nouns/things/entities such as "cat" and "mat," and it posits a relation of those entities. That matches the fact-in-the-world.
The fact is not true because true is the relational property of (a proposition) matching a fact. Facts don't have a relational property of matching a fact.
This doesn’t answer my question of how it is that a proposition can match something that neither is nor is not the case.
I’ll be honest and say I don’t entirely know what you’re on about, and I’m quite tired now. You seem to think the argument is that beliefs determine facts. This is not the argument. The argument is that there are facts and we ought to believe them.
We're not saying that the cat being on the mat is not the case. "Is the case" is another way of saying "is a fact." It's not another way of saying "is true" BECAUSE "true" is about the matching relationship.
If “is the case” means the same as “is a fact”, then something that “is the case” (since that just means “is a fact”) neither is nor is not the case, which (since “is the case” means “is a fact”) is to say it neither is nor is not a fact.
The premise of the argument is that if there no objective values there would be no facts. The claim is that without the former there cannot be the latter. This is a determinate relation.
Where is someone saying that something be a fact, or being the case, where the latter is another way of saying "is the case," isn't a fact or isn't the case? Where are you getting that from aside from using the terms as a synomym for "is true" and equivocating?
It’s not that our beliefs determine facts. It’s that facts are necessarily things that ought to be believed, but not that what they are is determined by beliefs.
The idea is rather that the values are a fact, somehow as a necessary upshot of facts in general. How that's supposed to work is left completely unattended, aside from saying that it's nonsense to believe otherwise.
You’ll have to be clearer, I can’t make sense of that.
Well, it’s not left unattended. I demonstrated that believing otherwise is nonsense, I didn’t just say it.
You are equivocating. It is not, according to Clark, that what the facts are that is determined by beliefs but rather that they are at all is determined by beliefs, for as he says:
Quoting AJJ
By objective values he means things we ought to believe. If there are not things we ought to believe then there are no objective values and therefore no facts.
Right, but to be more precise, the claim is not simply that it is a fact that there are values but a fact that there are objective values.
I have asked AJJ whether it is a fact that we ought to believe, which is to say, whether "we ought to believe" is an objective value.
Clark is attempting to collapse the fact/value distinction.
Yeah. But that’s not to say that the very existence of facts is determined by our beliefs, but that a necessary part of what they are is that they ought to be believed.
If facts are true statements and there are no objective values then saying that there are no objective values is a fact. If we ought believe true statements, then we ought not believe the above quote.
Just start with this. You claimed that someone was saying or something implied the following:
"something that 'is the case' neither is nor is not the case."
Where are you getting that from?
But that is not what he says. Or perhaps it is not what he actually says but what you say he says. In either case, the statement is:
Quoting AJJ
If a necessary part of what facts are is that they ought be believed, then if this necessary part does not exist, if they are not believed, then they do not exist.
I understand your objection now.
So a fact is a state of affairs, which is something that is the case, which is neither true nor false. You still have to answer how it is that a proposition could match such a thing.
Actually the word “fact” doesn’t even mean anything here. It means “state of affairs”, which means “is the case”, which means “fact”. The word just refers to itself.
It’s not that they don’t exist if they’re not believed. Everyone could stop believing facts and they’d still exist. It’s that they can’t exist without the necessary factor that they ought to be believed.
What cannot exist does not exist.
And I contend facts do exist, which means they ought to be believed if that is indeed a necessary part of their existence.
The argument, rephrased a little, contends that there must be objective values if there are facts. If this is the case then it’s not actually possible for “there are no objective values” to be a fact.
What is it that you contend and what is it that Clark contends? Is your OP a statement in his words or yours?
Is the claim that facts ought to be believed a fact? I have asked this question before.
In what sense is being believed a necessary part of the existence of facts? Can something exist without its necessary parts? According to what you say, in the case of facts, it seems they can; and so, in what sense is believing them a necessary part of their existence if their existence does not depend on them? They ought to be believed implies that they are not necessarily believed, and so, being believed is not a necessary part of their existence.
The OP is more or less a quote.
Yes, I would say so.
Quoting Fooloso4
Come on now, it’s not “being believed” that is necessary, it’s that they ought to be believed.
I explained that, but I'll do it again, one step at a time.
Start with the word "cat." Do you understand how the word "cat" can correspond with a cat?
No mate, this was the important bit:
Quoting AJJ
If “fact” doesn’t actually mean anything then you can’t match a proposition to one.
But it's not the case. "There are no objective values" is true.
Isn't that contradictory? To say it doesn't mean anything and then turn around and say what it meams?
Wow. That has to have been on purpose. Here’s the full quote again mate, come on now:
Quoting AJJ
It bloody baffles me that you guys do this. “Err, I’ll think you’ll fine you’re wrong mate.” *Post Comment*
Whether or not there are objective values is what's in contention. That is what's at issue. You're assuming what's at issue in the argument you're offering. I've merely done the same.
How do we reconcile that?
Argument for it rather than assume it.
Got one?
All statements are existentially dependent upon a subject. Some statements are true. All true statements are existentially dependent upon a subject. That which is existentially dependent upon a subject cannot be objective. There are no objective true statements. There is no objective truth value.
What’s more accurately been in contention is whether we ought to believe facts. The OP argument assumes it, I’ve been single-handedly defending that that is indeed the case, starting in fact from the OP.
Quoting creativesoul
You’ll have to more clearly explain what “All truth value is existentially dependent upon a subject” means.
Come on now, when you or Clark say:
Quoting AJJ
that makes facts contingent upon belief. You may want to revise his/your claim but either make it clear that you are revising it, or stick with what was said and defend it. You already backed away from defending it on page one:
Quoting AJJ
And so, if facts do not depend on whether or not we believe them then how can it be that if there are no objective values then there are no facts?
If facts are true statements, then whether or not we ought believe them has nothing to do with 'objective values'. We can know what sorts of things can be true and what makes them so. We can know how irrevocably important it is to form, have, and/or hold true belief. We can know that and also know that there is no such thing as 'objective value' aside from being an imaginary construct. It points to nothing but linguistic conception.
No it bloody doesn’t mate. It means, as you keeping forcing me to say, that they ought to be believed. That does not mean that they’re contingent on belief. It means we ought to believe them. They still exist if we don’t, but we ought to believe them. We don’t have to believe them to make them exist, they exist anyway, and we ought to believe them.
I have no idea why you guys spout this nonsense about me not defending the argument. Look back over the thread, please. Be fair.
Quoting Fooloso4
See above.
Urgh. I don’t care about anyone’s personal credo.
If it means something, it's not true that it means nothing, right?
Nope, try again:
Quoting AJJ
Your belief isn't necessary. If what I've said is true, then what you've said is not.
Fascinating.
Be well.
Oy vey
“Oy vey” all you want mate. Unclear whether you actually get the point or not. Seems a good one to me though.
It would help if you provided the original claim in context, but despite the request to do so early on, you have not, unfortunately, done so. And so, all we have to go on is what you have presented. It is a simple if-then claim - if not this then not that. Now you may claim it means something else, and perhaps Clark meant or said something different, but based on what you have presented there is not reason to believe he did.
As stated, it does not say we ought to believe facts. If says that if there are no facts then there is nothing we ought to believe. One major flaw with this is the jump from objective values to facts. As has been stated repeatedly by various participants, that we ought to believe something is not a statement of objective value. Even if we accept that one ought to believe objective facts, it does not follow that this is an objective value.
In order to see this, suppose that all those who agree that we ought to believe objective facts are wrong. If you object that they can't be wrong, an appeal to objective values does not demonstrate that they are wrong. The demonstration that they are wrong is based on a) the contraction of accepting a fact and not believing it - if one accepts it as a fact then one believes it, and if one does not believe it then one does not accept it as a fact it, or b) the practical consequences of not believing the facts of the matter - if you do not accept that the ice is too thin to skate on you risk falling through. Practical consequences are not objective values. If there is some third option that demonstrates that accepting facts is an objective value you have not presented it, even if you have unflaggingly repeated it. Neither logic nor practical consequences are objective values.
I’m tired and about to quit, so I’ll just refer you to the thread again. I’ve defended the argument as much as I’d like to now.
However, as I said, there are many instances when someone knows what ought to be done, but does not do it. For example, knowingly breaking the law, it happens all the time. So it's completely false to say "I know what I ought to do therefore I do it". It must be something other than knowing what ought to be done which inspires one to do what ought to be done. This was covered in some depth by Augustine.
Quoting AJJ
Actually, I've considered what you've said, and demonstrated it as false, reread the above if you still do not understand that.
Quoting AJJ
I don't think anyone knows the answer to that question, that's why there is philosophy, to seek the answers to questions like that. But it's very clear that the inspiration to be moral does not come from understanding what moral is, just watch a child learning. We only come to understand what moral is, a long time after learning how to be moral, if ever.
This ignores important parts of my last two responses to you. You can try again if you want, may not respond though.
Why is the notion of objective value so important on your view?
Though I would actually be interested in an example of a lie that leads to good.
The Nazis are at your doorstep. They ask...
Are there any Jews in your attic? There are.
Quoting creativesoul
And here’s what I wanted to say: It’s not telling the Nazis the truth there that leads to wrong, it’s the implicit lie that they should arrest the Jews. It could be that those particular Nazis oppose their regime, and would actually help the Jews once they knew they were there, because they recognise it’s true that they should do so. It’s always the truth that leads to good.
I recognise that in reality you would have the Nazis believe the lie in that situation. But in principle, if everyone understood the truth, then no wrong would occur.
Last thing: If you say that someone can know the truth yet still do wrong, then I’d say they’re justifying that wrong to themselves with something they believe is true, but is actually a lie.
So all together we ought to believe the truth (facts), since it’s by the truth that we do right. Take that as my final statement because I really do want to close this now.
Aye, a little too much maybe.
The original argument is:
(1) If there are no objective values then there are no facts (since there’s nothing that we ought to believe).
(2) There are facts.
(C) Therefore there are objective values.
(2) seems just fine, and most folk who deny the existence of objective values will accept (2), so probably not much need for an argument there. The trouble all starts with (1). What exactly is the argument for (1)?
I think the argument for (1) is meant to be the part in the brackets. Looking through your discussion with Terrapin, I guess you had this in mind:
(3) Facts are things we ought to believe.
(4) If there are no objective values then there is nothing we ought to believe.
(C2) If there are no objective values then there are no facts.
And (C2) here is identical with (1), giving us an argument for (1). But there are problems with this argument. The inference from (3) and (4) to (C2) is only valid if (3) is meant as a definition of "facts". If "fact" is defined as "something we ought to believe", it then follows that if there are no objective values there are no facts. But if (3) is instead taken to mean "we ought to believe facts", where "fact" means something like "propositions stating how things are", the argument will be fallacious. In that case, that there are no objective values and nothing we ought to believe will not entail that there are no propositions stating how things are (facts), since (and this was pointed out by others) it might be that there is a way things are without there being any rules about how we should/should-not believe.
So we must take (3) as a definition of "fact". The problem is, if we take (3) as a definition, no one who denies or is agnostic about the existence of objective values will accept your [I](2)[/I] without argument. That is, they will not accept that there are facts, because they will not accept that there are things we ought to believe. And all this is just to say that the argument will not convince anyone who doesn't already agree that there are objective values, making it a poor argument indeed.
Now, you did offer a different argument, which was to claim that denying that there are things we ought to believe is "absurd". You look to prove that it is absurd by this argument:
Quoting AJJ
and again in talking with Wayfarer:
Quoting AJJ
So any person who denies that there are things we ought to believe can be asked [I]"well, ought we believe that there is nothing we ought to believe?"[/I], and the sceptic will have to reply [I]"no, there is nothing we ought to believe"[/I], which puts him, according to you, in an absurd position. I don't see why it is absurd. He denies that there is anything which we ought to believe, and, consistently, holds that even his own assertions are not such that we ought to believe them. We may choose to believe his claims or not, as we please. This seems a perfectly coherent position. I can describe my own beliefs without insisting that others ought to have those beliefs, and so can the sceptic. He can say that there is nothing we ought to believe, without insisting that this is something we ought to believe. He might nevertheless be correct. I don't see why the mere fact that you could ask him the question again does anything to hurt his position. It doesn't show that his position is false or contradictory, nor is there any barrier to understanding his position. The regress doesn't seem to be vicious.
PA
All I’ll say is the statement, “it is true that true things are not things we ought to believe, and so we’re not obliged to believe that either”, seems obviously absurd to me, especially considering that the statement itself is supposed to be a statement of truth, which we’re not obliged to believe (so why even say it?)
Maybe that absurdity really is the fact of the matter (that we’re not obliged to believe), but I wonder if that is sincerely believed by anyone.
That's clearly not the case, because the person would believe contradictory things as true, I ought to do this (being the real truth), and I ought not do this (being the rationalized justification for doing wrong).. The person would believe both of these as true at the same time.
It seems to be pointless discussing this with you, but if you've read some Plato, you might recognize that this is the issue that Socrates had with some sophists. These sophists claimed to teach virtue. They put forth the principle "virtue is knowledge", and charged lots of money to teach virtue. By questioning whether virtue was the type of thing which could be taught, Socrates discovered a hole, a gap between knowing ethical principles, and behaving accordingly. He discovered a defect in the principle "virtue is knowledge", because knowing what one ought to do does not necessitate the person to do it.
This gap becomes very evident when we consider immoral people, who study the law to find loopholes so that they can get away with their immoral tendencies. I wouldn't say that these people believe that the law is the truth, and they justify disobeying the law with something else which they believe as the truth, or that they believe what they are doing is supported by truth, and the law is not, they simply do not believe in truth. There are people who just do not believe in truth (president Trump for example), and this belief is well grounded in science based ontology like model-dependent realism.
There is no point to insisting that these people believe it is true that there is no truth, because this just demonstrates that you misunderstand the nature of belief. Belief is based in faith and confidence, and believing that something is true is a type of belief. It is to add an extra layer of confidence to a specified belief, to attribute truth to it. So you have two distinct beliefs, the belief in X, and the belief that X is true. To say that this is redundancy is to demonstrate a misunderstanding of the nature of belief. To believe in something (such as I believe in myself) does not necessarily imply that one thinks the thing believed in is true.
I said “Last thing” and you write a bloody essay at me.
I skimmed it and it seems to me you’ve not properly considered what I’ve been saying again, or you’re just failing to understand. Others can judge, so let’s call it a day.
It's certainly believed by me that it's neither a fact nor true that there are things we ought/ought not believe.
I have a disposition that there are some things we ought/ought not believe, but that's different than saying that it's a fact or true that there are things we ought/ought not believe.
If I feel you ought to believe what I'm saying here that's an opinion or disposition I have. It's not a fact or true independent of me.
You seem to have difficulty accepting the truth. Is that evidence against your own premise?
Let's go back to the op:
Quoting AJJ
How would you deal with an ontology like pragmatism? Assume a process ontology which declares that there is no such thing as facts because all of reality is in motion and relative. You ought to believe such and such because it is a useful principle. So, for instance, science doesn't deal with facts, it operates with principles which are useful for prediction, therefore they ought to be believed.. And, 2+2=4 is not a fact, it is a useful principle, therefore it ought to be believed. There is no point to your question "is that a fact?", because you must establish first that the idea of "a fact" is an acceptable idea, within this belief structure which already rejects the idea of "facts" as useless.
Settle down. I’ve told you three times now that I’ve had enough.
Where are the objective facts which indicate to me that I ought to stop writing?
I've just come across this thread and entirely agree with you.
The substantive issue to me is that no metaphysical debate can rely on classical (binary) logic, because set membership (properties) of 'focal concepts' is contextually transient. That point is of course highlighted by the pragmatists and the post modernists, and receives a hostile reception from traditionalists who are the target of such iconoclasm.
Under the presumption that a traditionalist stands for those practicing philosophy before pragmatists and post-modernists, who would you consider a currently practicing traditionalist?
OK.
Confusing ideas and epistemology with ontology. How novel. :roll:
As a matter of interest, of your 9000 or so posts here, how many of them are negative ?:smile:
there's many problems with this, most typically, the Santa Claus problem. There are many cases where facts do not define what we ought to believe. And the problem goes deeper, as I just found in an argument with Terrapin about Anaximander.
Probably not much more than a handful--definitely less than 10. I don't know if any would remain/not be deleted. Usually if you're just insulting someone or whatever it gets deleted.
If you're instead referring to critical posts, probably all of them are. We're supposed to be more or less doing philosophy here. You can't do that non-critically. Part of your responsibility in taking part is being able to defend claims against critical challenges.
I haven't been able to figure out what you mean by "focal concept". Care to explain?
The well known 'ambiguous picture' which is interpreted as either 'two profiles' or 'one candlestick' exemplifies an extreme of the potential shifting of 'focal concepts'. More gradual transitions seem to be the norm are the interaction progresses, sometimes analysed using 'fuzzy logic'. Derrida's term 'privileging' is perhaps illustrative of this process at a more abstract level.
These points also indirectly refer to the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, ....'that thinking is determined by language'.....(Whorf was originally an insurance assessor who noticed that explosions kept occurring at 'empty gasoline drum' dumps. It turned out that the drums were empty of liquid, but not of vapour. i.e. the expectancies associated with the focal concept 'empty' were ill founded)
I think I get it. "The drum is empty of liquid", and "the drum is full of vapour", are two distinct focal concepts, referring to the same thing. I think my point was that before we can proceed in an ontological discussion we need to establish our starting point. What are we talking about, liquid or gas? From one perspective the drum is empty, and from the other it is full. I think AJJ was tying to mix them up, is and ought.
Facts are falsifiable human descriptions of those objective conditions. To that extent, they are objective descriptions of those objective conditions. Or, as objective as it is possible to be without being those objective conditions.
If humans cease to exist, such falsifiable descriptions of the objective conditions of reality also cease to exist.
However, the objective conditions of reality themselves do not cease to exist if humans and their descriptions of them cease to exist.
An *objective* phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and human beliefs. Radioactivity, for example, is not a myth.
The *subjective* is something that exists depending on the consciousness and beliefs of a single individual.
The *inter-subjective* is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals. Inter-subjective phenomena are neither malevolent frauds nor insignificant charades. They exist in a different way from physical phenomena such as radioactivity, but their impact on the world may still be enormous. Many of history’s most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations.
Similarly, the dollar, human rights and the United States of America exist in the shared imagination of billions, and no single individual can threaten their existence. If I alone were to stop believing in the dollar, in human rights, or in the United States, it wouldn’t much matter. These imagined orders are *inter-subjective*, so in order to change them we must simultaneously change the consciousness of billions of people, which is not easy.
You can't have a judgment anywhere but in an individual's mind.
Just think of the meaning of a word like "awesome": is this meaning objective or subjective? Neither, it is intersubjective, because one individual cannot change its meaning (that would be the case if the meaning was subjective), and it is not "out there" as an objective entity that could be studied by science.
The problem with your argument is you use "we".
You are lack the imagination in your argument to understand that other people can, in a very strange and roundabout way, believe they ought to believe non-truths. If you said "I should believe facts", then sure, you should believe facts if you value truth.
However, one is not obliged to value truth, and insofar as that is the case, then even if it's true that you should believe, it's not an objective truth.
This is what is trying to say.
Not by his words in this debate -- which is just foolishness that you have identified as much -- but his goals for debating on this forum to begin with, as he tells us in the "Why is Ayn Rand not Accepted Academically?"
Quoting Terrapin Station
If Terrapin's goal is to goad you into wasting your time, then he ought to not only deny any obviously true statement you make but also genuinely believe it's not true, for with genuine belief comes much more effective goading.
Now, can he defend this goal in any rational way? No. But by simply claiming his goal is rational he attains it: for people will waste yet more time trying to convince him that goading people rather than engaging in constructive debate is harming mostly himself. "Aha!" He will say to himself, "I have succeeded once again, they have wasted more of their time". So, not only should he believe lies to attain his goal, he should never question internally if his goal is worthwhile as that would divert effort away from his goal and stand in his way of attaining it.
And, should goals be attained? Of course. How truer a statement could ever be made, and so from a much clearer and more abstract perspective, the truth does come to his aid for indeed the definition of goals is that which you want to attain, he has a goal and therefore wants to attain it and if he needs to believe lies to attain it, so be it; it's a noble sacrifice to forego what would otherwise be useful, as presumably the truth would otherwise be useful, in striving to achieve a higher objective.
For, if I ought to believe lies, I ought to believe the lie that I ought to believe lies. This is were you argument fails in terms of objectivity: people can choose to value lies over truth and simply deny any true statement that would lead them to believe otherwise. Therefore, it is not the case we would all agree that we ought to believe the truth, for some people can prefer lies as well as prefer to simply deny the possibility of any understanding that undermine their own belief in their project.
This is similar reasoning the Randians use. They both assert that their self interested actions achieve the social good, and deny any social good exists apart from self interest. They both assert self interest is rational because everyone wants to achieve their goals, whatever they are (don't judge me bro), and deny that socialists or communists or anarchists or trade unionists or collectivists are rational in trying to achieve whatever their goal is (they are vile Stalinists that will bring back the gulag). both is and is not defending Rand, both is and is not interested in the debate at all.
And crucially, it is against their self interest to believe anything that would undermine their current concept of what their self interest is. So, if concern for the environment would undermine the idea that they should seek to maximize resource consumption throughput, and this is only possible in a society that seeks to maximize resource consumption throughput at a macro level, and they can intuit that it is trivial to arrive at the conclusion that the very conditions that support society and make civilization possible are a social good apart from arbitrary self interest of individuals in that society: therefore, even if they are devoted to "being objective" and "empiricism" and "science" and "Aristotle", they must simply deny any environmental issue could ever cause a problem for society (that rich geniuses won't easily solve). If they promote what they know are lies for the purposes of confusing the public in order to support anti-environmental policy -- whether they really believe the concerns will be easily solved by technology we do not yet have or whether they intuit this "negative externality" thing is really a serious conceptual problem for them -- then they ought not only to spread those lies to attain their goals, as in the volcano example (but to avoid any action against the danger, rather than promote responsible action to verify, address and deal with the danger if it is present), but ought also to make whatever act of will required to really believe those lies, for true belief is more effective than doubt and so more valuable to attain their goals than whatever it is that is true: again a noble sacrifice.
For it is not a curiosity of philosophy that it is conceptually possible to value lies over truth, people really do it and work backwards from the lie to whatever statements they need to believe that supports it, changing to whatever seems the next convenient beliefs to support the lie when encountering criticism they can't deal with.
They are as devoted to the lie as you are to the truth, which of course they will tell you is a lie and make whatever further statements are needed to try to convince you, and themselves, that it is true.
Quoting AJJ
I agree that the statement makes no sense, though others can simply disagree by believing they ought to disagree, so it's not objective.
The argument is the same structure as " 'no truth exist' cannot be true, as if it was true it would assert it was itself false". Likewise, "Something must exist, as if nothing existed this statement, and whoever is making it, wouldn't exist either".
If the book you refer to uses this argument to jump to the conclusion that Christianity is true, that leap doesn't work. We can use the above arguments only to refute arguments of the form "Christianity can't be true because nothing is true" or "Christian ethics can't be true because no ought statement is true" (it is as you suspect: someone advising you to "not believe A" cannot do so because "nothing should be believed to begin with" -- but, as discussed above, it does not prevent them from genuinely believing that they should make that statement and genuinely believe that "they have the truth that no ethic is true and that they and others ought to believe it").
Now, that "all statements are false" is false, and "facts should be believed" is a statement you should believe, does not do much, and may at first glance seem can't do anything, in pointing towards anything else that is true or things ought to be believed.
However, Kant does use this style argument to found his ethics, but in a slightly different form.
He argues in essence that to believe anything at all we must assign value to ourselves, our potential to believe anything in the first place must be a good potential and we must be good to have it, and that, therefore, the only coherent position is to not only value ourselves but assign the same value to others.
I think Rand blows. It's just that that's not the only reason she's not part of the academic philosophy canon. Tons of stuff in the canon blows.
How does this happen ontologically?
Following from my premise here, which is your goal is to goad people into wasting time and you will work backwards to whatever statements and beliefs are necessary for that (which you have stated is your goal), then it follows you've just selected the belief that you believe will maximize your goading potential.
Perhaps you did believe "Rand blows", perhaps you didn't. Perhaps you did believe Rand was great, but now genuinely believe you previously believed she blows.
I have no problem accepting that you genuinely believe whatever is necessary to attain your goal of more goading.
Meaning is subjective for example. It only occurs in persons' heads.
That's not at all the case. You have really poor reading comprehension, as you've demonstrated over and over again.
Well, if my premise is correct, that:
Quoting boethius
Then it follows that your claim that I have poor reading comprehension you've selected because it maximizes your goading potential.
Again, I have no problem accepting you genuinely believe this.
I also have no problem believing you genuinely believe your method of reading comprehension that involves literally "not reading" is superior to mine that does involve reading:
Quoting Terrapin Station
Quoting Terrapin Station
Is surely a way to comprehend what someone has written (in your mind).
Not true.
If your sentence was true, Humpty Dumpty would be right ("When I use a word,it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.") But that is obviously not how it works, otherwise communication would break down...
If your sentence was true, you could access a meaning of an unknown word by introspection (but again that is not how it works: you have to ask other people or look it up in a dictionary, therefore it is NOT only in your head. The very existence of dictionaries shows that meanings of words are not subjective
Seen from the perspective of a subject (you or me), the meaning of "dog" is a real as the meaning of 2+2=4: we have to learn (!) it and neither you nor me can change it. The meaning of "dog" does not depend on the opinion of a subject (unless you call the totality of all speakers of English a "subject", which would be rather mystical...)
Subjective entities depend for their existence and for their characteristics on a subject. If they depend on many subjects, they are social or inter-subjective entities.
(See also John Searle. "The construction of social reality" - - who distinguishes "brute facts" (objects) from "institutional facts" (what I would call *intersubjective entities*)
There's no real need for anyone else to say anything in addition to Terrapin Station's refutation in the first few replies back on page one. You should try to be more reasonable instead of standing by a weak and easily refuted argument.
You give credence to phonies espousing pseudoscience. If it looks like a good book to you, then that's reason to be wary.
According to Terrapin “fact” means the same thing as “is the case”, which means the same thing as “state of affairs”, which means “fact”. But he never actually said what these terms refer to outside themselves.
I would say that they refer to something that is true, and we ought to believe true things. What do you say they refer to?
There shouldn't be any need to do so. The problem here lies with you and your unreasonable request. The meaning of those terms, accompanied by a number of examples, is sufficient to obtain an understanding of what facts are. Feigning ignorance is not a valid defence.
Quoting AJJ
That's an unconventional definition followed by an irrelevant opinion. Conventionally, it is statements which are true, and facts which are the case. Facts aren't statements. They are truthmakers, they're not themselves true.
That you say that we ought to believe true things is of no logical relevance. I haven't read all eight pages of discussion, but I'll hazard a guess that this has been said to you multiple times, but you've just decided to stand your ground.
So “facts” are “states of affairs”, which “are the case”, which are “truthmakers”. What do these terms refer to, if not to things that are true?
My view is that statements and propositions are true when they correspond to things that are capital T True.
Your view seems to be that statements and propositions are true when they correspond to something that is neither true nor false (so how do they ever correspond?)
It seems to me I’m stating the obvious here.
First, we need to not conflate definitions and meaning. Or, at least we need to not conflate text or sound strings with meaning. If a text string were the same thing as meaning, then there would never be any question as to what the meaning of anything is--you'd just point to the text string (also, I'm conveniently for your sake overlooking that there are no non-subjective associations of the type you'd need for the pointing reference). And no people would even be required for meaning. A piece of paper could "do meaning" on its own, since a piece of paper can contain a text string.
Re this: "you could access a meaning of an unknown word," you're already assuming an ontology in which there are meanings--whatever they're supposed to be, exactly, in your ontology--that are independent of what anyone is doing in their head, there for us to discover.
What one does instead is create meaning in one's head. When the meaning you create in your head doesn't make sense with the behavior you observe, then you make adjustments or additions to your subjective meaning in order to make sense of what you experience/observe. That's how communication works (when it does; often it doesn't; often we find others impenetrable, as happens often on this very site--that would be inexplicable if meaning were only text strings (and sound strings, gestures, etc.)).
I said something very specific/qualified about that. Hence you demonstrating poor reading comprehension.
I explained this to you already. How something corresponds is that there's a cat, for example, sitting on a mat, and we say, "The cat is on the mat." What we say corresponds, or more or less "matches" something. We're naming that matching of proposition-to-state-of-affairs "truth."
But you won’t say what a “state of affairs” actually is. I’m saying a state of affairs is part of the objective Truth, and is therefore something that is true.
Basically states of affairs are relations of existent things, as well as properties of existent things. Things exist, they have properties, and they are situated in certain (dynamic) ways with respect to other existent things. Those are states of affairs.
If we're using the word "truth" to refer to the matching of propositions-to-states-of-affairs, you're saying that states of affairs are part of the objective matching of propositions-to-states-of-affairs?
Would you that statements and propositions are false when they correspond to things that are capital F False?
Fine. I’m saying those relations are part of what is True.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I don’t know why you’d refer to the matching as “true”. Referring to a statement or proposition as “true” when it corresponds to the Truth makes sense. What you’re saying seems incoherent to me.
No - I’d say they’re false when they do not correspond to what is True.
Okay, but that's not how we're using the word "true." We're using the word "true" to ONLY refer to propositions matching states of affairs.
Since those relations are NOT a proposition matching a state of affairs, they're not true.
It's very simple. To understand it you simply need to understand that we're ONLY using the word "true" to refer to propositions matching states of affairs.
Then, under this, to answer whether something is "true," you ask yourself, "Is that a proposition matching a state of affairs?" If the answer is "no," then it's not true.
Quoting AJJ
The reasons stem from (a) an analysis of how people use "true," functionally (which can therefore be different than what they have in mind), and (b) a realization that there's a problem--the same problem that EricH just pointed to above--if we treat "true" as a property of states of affairs. That problem enters the picture when we try to account for "false." We either wind up having to posit some very wonky ontology, or we wind up having to say that "false" is a very different sort of thing (in the "natural kind" sense, basically--the sort of ontological thing that it is) than "true" is.
No we’re not. I’m using the word “true” to refer to what is True. I’m using it in a way that actually makes sense.
Quoting Terrapin Station
False is what is not True. I wouldn’t say Truth is a property of anything. Things that are true are part of the Truth, not the other way around.
"We" as in S, EricH, etc. and I, as well as analytic philosophers in general.
Quoting AJJ
And that "what" is what exactly ontologically? What sort of thing is it?
OK.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Whatever the state of affairs, statement or proposition is in question. “The cat is on the mat” is false if the cat is not on the mat.
Can a thing be false and thus part of the capital F False?
So the thing that's false is a proposition. "The cat is on the mat" is a proposition, and that's what you're saying is false.
So why wouldn't what's true likewise be a proposition?
The statement is false because it doesn’t correspond to something that is true, i.e. part of the Truth. It would be true if the cat being on the mat was true, i.e part of the Truth.
No - it can be false, which is to say it wouldn’t be part of the Truth.
I'm a plain language person, so what I'll be saying next may not be as precise in philosophical terminology as others might put it.
The words true & false are opposites in semantic meaning, you cannot have one without the other.
However, if I'm following you, the word False (capital F) has no functional usage. This then implies that the word Truth (capital T) has no counterpart. As such, it seems like you could substitute the word "reality" or the phrase "state of affairs" for the word Truth (capital T).
AJJ - I know this is not an easy thing to comprehend - it took me a while to wrap my head around what Terrapin & S are saying.
I understand them fine. To them the word “true” refers to when a statement or proposition matches a state of affairs. However, the state of affairs to them is neither true nor false. I’m saying that the state of affairs is part of the objective Truth, which is why a statement can be said to be true when it corresponds to It.
Substitute the word “reality” for “Truth” if you like. In that case something that is false would be so because it is not part of “reality”. But “reality” there just refers to the objective Truth.
Well unless you can explain how literally "not reading" is useful for reading comprehension, I'm unable to take much stock in your opinion on reading comprehension.
Let's review more closely:
Quoting Terrapin Station
You clearly state that you engage in debate you are not interested in and you enjoy wasting people time by typing less but watching them type more.
If you do this, then presumably it's among your goals on this forum to achieve, and so likely to be the intention we see in some, if not all, of you posts.
Keeping with the theme of this thread, I have no problem accepting that you may genuinely believe one moment you are debating in good faith and the next moment just "enjoy going back and forth" with no concern to the content of your words. I have no problem accepting one moment you genuinely believe all of your posts have been made only in good faith, and the next moment genuinely believe all your posts have been only to goad people or to build up a position from which to goad.
The problem with simply announcing that you engage in bad faith debate -- for (I assume) the enjoyment of the moment of "striking a blow" since you could do nothing else with respect to argumentative substance you are unable to deal with -- is that once you claim you argue in bad faith, your subsequent claims that "oh, this time it's good faith" are hollow; it's entirely consistent to assume your subsequent protests "that sometimes I engage in debate in bad faith but this time not" is itself an argument in bad faith selected because you want to get back in the goading game when it was fun (before you had not only let the cat out of the bag but nailed it to a board).
But please, humor me, elaborate on the:
Quoting Terrapin Station
To show when you engage just "not that interested in it, really, but I enjoy going back and forth with people who act like as much of an unjustifiably arrogant asshole as you do" and so we can just ignore you, and under what conditions "no, no, I really am interested and I have only respect for the other people participating in the debate".
If you can provide no reasons for us to believe you even have such "specific/qualified" ideas in your mind that would make the difference, I think it's safe to assume that you don't debate in good faith all the time, and it's saver to assume never, and simply keep asking you to account of your own claim that "not that interested in it, really, but I enjoy going back and forth".
That being said, I have no issue with believing you truly believe what is convenient for you to believe one moment, and may completely change it the next if new beliefs become more convenient.
That if presented with a fact, such as the above is a reasonable response to a bad-faith actor in a debate, then, even if you see the fact is true, you will genuinely believe "I ought not to believe the fact" but rather "I ought to believe whatever facts will lead to more 'enjoyment of going back and forth' ". And so you win against AJJ! Believing facts are not objective, we need not all, or do, believe we ought to believe facts. You can take comfort in that.
I'm also a plain language person, although I can engage in complex semantic discussion when required.
In this case, I do not think that leads anywhere, and you maybe straying farther and farther away from the plain language usage of the words truth, ought, reality at your peril.
For instance, imagine plain situations. Someone says "It's raining outside", you say "is that a fact?" they say "yes", so you ask "ah, but is that fact true?" and they say "yes" and you ask "ahhaaah, but ought we believe facts?", they respond "yes, don't be silly". From there, the conversation can go no where constructive in any normal situation.
To believe we can actually take apart the words "ought", "true", "facts", "belief" and arrive at a different conclusion (or interpretation of all the words so radically different that we no longer even know what we're talking about) other than, "yes, a person that values truth, ought to believe a fact if they have sufficient reason to believe that fact is true".
Quoting AJJ
As noted in my first response, "objective" in your argument makes it not true, under most definitions of objective. With definitions of objective that are fine, such as "unbiased", it doesn't add anything to say the truth is unbiased.
Wouldn't statements then be true because they correspond to something that is "true"?
If so, then true should refer to statements corresponding.
But if that's the case, it makes no sense of that second occurrence of true above, the one I put in quotation marks.
For me “true” can refer to statements and propositions that correspond to the objective Truth. It can also refer to things that are part of the objective Truth, i.e. facts.
All you’ve really been doing is asserting your own view of what a fact is, but the above is the perfectly reasonable definition I’ve been using.
If there is objective Truth, then things that are part of it are true and the OP argument goes ahead. If there is no objective Truth, then obviously there are no objective values.
We all agree that a proposition/statement about reality can be false. I'm not understanding what you mean when you say "something that is false". How can a "something" be false? Can you give an example?
If the cat is not sitting on the mat then it’s false that the cat is sitting on the mat. The “something” there is the state of affairs of the cat sitting on the mat.
We agree.
Quoting AJJ
I'm not getting this. If the cat is explicitly not sitting on the mat, then it cannot be the state of affairs that the cat is sitting on the mat. The state of affairs is that the cat is not sitting on the mat.
Again, your use of the word objective makes your, otherwise perfectly sensible in my view, argument simply not true.
The meaning of "objectivity" as you implied in your OP, and seems very much the writer's usage you are sourcing your argument, generally refers to scientific objectivity. "There is no objective ethic" is true when understood in the context of science. The fact that you can perform no experiment which would resolve the issue of "ought I to believe facts" is reason for extreme skepticism that it is an objective statement, in the scientific sense of objective.
"I ought to believe facts", I agree is true (and trivially so as you have been suggesting for most of the arguments you have been making), maybe "everyone ought to believe facts" whether they believe it or not, is also true. Your author, however, makes a mistake in concluding that this shows "an objective ethic exists"; which one should already be skeptical of because "objective" doesn't even appear in the argument (that you have presented anyway).
No scientific experiment can resolve "ought we to believe facts" so it's not objective in this scientific sense.
Not everyone needs to agree that "I ought to believe facts", they may disagree just for the heck of it without any justification or reasoning and simply deny any criticism of their position, and if they want they can go further and say "I ought to believe lies" and can then point to as neat an infinite regress as you provided in your OP of "I ought to be believe lies, and I ought to believe the lie that I ought to believe lies, and I ought to believe that lie, etc.". So it's not objective in the sense that everyone has to agree (nothing is; at best most people agree, it seems, for now).
In terms of logical structure, both argument are similar and you can not decide to believe "I ought to believe facts" simply because it leads to infinite regress as lies can also have infinite regress.
Other uses of "objective" are either purely ornamental, it adds a bit of prestige to say "objective truth" rather than just "truth", or have no functional meaning in your argument, such as "unbiased truth"; bias hasn't been an issue so there's no reason to specify the truth is unbiased.
So you can simply remove "objective" from your argument and have a "I ought to believe facts" and claim it's true. You'll probably have the same objections (but at least have a more refined position).
I think if a state of affairs can be described as impossible then it can be described as false. Either way your describing something that isn’t true.
If I say “the cat was sitting on the circular square shaped mat” I’m describing “something” (a state of affairs) that is impossible and false.
By “objective” I mean existing independent of thought. I’ve been using it where I don’t absolutely need to when the other person has a different definition of “truth”.
If “I ought to believe lies” is a lie then that’s actually good for the OP argument. If it’s true then it’s a paradox, since you ought not to believe that you ought to believe lies, and you ought not to believe that, and so on. So my argument for why we should believe facts is still fine.
Actually, if “I ought to believe lies” is true then I don’t think it does lead to a paradox. It seems to me you just can’t justify it like you can with the truth.
Out of curiosity, does the author use objective that way?
I've never encountered "objective truth" to mean independent from thought, usually "objective" is used precisely to refer to some thinking process, either individual or collective, that strives to arrive at a perspective of the truth (as in as close as possible). For instance, "I'm trying to be objective here", or "this is objective analysis" or "these scientists were objective", which is why I took such issue with it.
Also, if the "truth" refers to the "beliefs" (beliefs corresponding to facts corresponding to reality, or real states of affairs, or the case etc.) then there is no truth independent of thought.
The usual word in philosophy for reality independent of our thoughts about it, is "the noumena", which again comes from Kant referring to the "the thing in itself". We see phenomena in our minds that we infer arises from some noumena that gave rise to the phenomena (exactly how they are connected is very difficult to say).
The problem with this is that you're using "true" to refer to two completely different ideas, and you're expecting the different ideas to be clear via using a lower-case versus capital letter for the words. You'd have to always explain your usage there, though, because it's completely novel. No one is going to know what you're talking about if you don't explain it.
The way I'm using "fact" is a very mundane, standard way to use that term in the sciences, philosophy, etc.
Yes, was just writing that, just like with the truth, I just keep asserting the lie. You tell me that's a lie, I say "great, lies are what I ought to believe".
This degenerates quickly into the well known problem of denying the law of non-contradiction. I say "we should avoid contradiction", you say "no, we should contradict ourselves", I contradict you on that, you say "awesome, thanks".
I assume so. To my understanding that’s what term generally means in philosophy.
Quoting boethius
“Truth” doesn’t refer to beliefs. That would make it subjective. Truth independent of thought is objective.
It seems to me that noumena is what I mean when I refer to objective reality.
Your loss.
It’s not novel. Perhaps start reading a little more widely. The way you use the word is poorly justified and tendentious.
So give a couple examples of the distinction being used by others.
I agree that you can use the truth like this, if you define your terms carefully. But we usually, in common language and in most technical philosophy (since there's no reason to use words differently than normal without cause), use the truth to qualify beliefs as true or false (sometimes something else; the law-of-the-excluded middle is a rabbit whole). So "the Truth" really refers to just all true beliefs, which of course are true because they correspond to "reality" or "the case", or whatever the truth corresponds to.
Saying "this tree is true" doesn't really make much sense in the common usage of truth, whereas "this tree is real" makes sense. The typical philosopher would say "the phenomena of the tree is apparent to me, and I believe it's true that the tree really is there as we'd commonly say, but I also know there's some noumena of the tree beyond what I see and I can't access that noumena", or something similar (and I leave it completely open to what the typical philosopher would say "might be the noumena": pure matter, pure thought, etc.).
The author of the OP seems obviously to be using it that way. The OED’s first definition is one I’ve been using, which I’d say is a fair indication of its use.
You know that I'm asking you about a distinction signified by lower-case versus capital letters, right?
Oh right - well the OP author does that. Whether his use is novel or not I don’t know.
Scanning through the part of the book I can access online, it looks like he's using capital letters to allude to notions connected to God. I can't find anywhere that he is defining distinctions related to capitalization, but I'm just scanning through part of the book, so maybe I overlooked it or can't access that part.
The distinction between objective truth and the almost empty way that you’ve been using the word I thought was obvious.
It seems as if you're reading your own ideas into it, unless you can point to someplace where he (at least contextually) defines the distinction he's making based on capitalization. The passages I'm seeing all allude to religious ideas.
This has gotten far too inane. The distinction is obvious to me. But who knows, perhaps I’ve gotten it all wrong. That’ll do anyway.
It appears that you are using a different definition of state of affairs than others are. Here is Terrapin's:
Quoting Terrapin Station
Given this definition, any state of affairs cannot be described as impossible because there ain't no such thing as an impossible state of affairs.
You can make statements/propositions about hypothetical states of affairs in ways that are contradictory and/or false.
Are you seeing that as controversial? If x is a state of affairs, then x isn't impossible. That seems fairly obvious, no?
Quoting EricH
Sure, but then what we're describing isn't actually a state of affairs.
You have a fair point. But a hypothetical state of affairs then seems to me “something” that is necessarily not true, i.e. false.
Quoting Terrapin Station
As far as I can tell we're in agreement on both points. However, my powers of persuasion are insufficient/inadequate when it comes to convincing AJJ of this.
Eh? I said in my last post that you had a fair point:
Quoting AJJ
I think it's important to distinguish objective, subjective, and transcendental truths. By the latter, I'm not referring to the supernatural, but things which, while they may be true irrespective of what any particular person believes about them, are not objective, because they don't pertain to the realm of objects. I think that mathematical proofs fall into this category; their validity is determined by reason alone, but they're not objective, because their reality is solely intellectual. They are in some sense transcendentally true (although the term is not usually used in exactly that way.)
That's close in meaning to 'noumenal' . Have a glance at the Wikipedia article on Noumenon, which indeed gives one definition of noumenon as 'the object of an act of thought'. It is well understood that when this is used in reference to ideal objects such as the triangle, that it refers to a concept which is purely intellectual in nature, not to any specific instance of the concept in question. So the ‘noumenal’’ refers to the domain of ideal objects although this is derived from the definition of the word, not the way Kant used it.
As you may know, Kant refers to these as synthetic transcendentals, though I'm not sure Kant would say they are not objective because they are not objects. As you note, we can view all objects as actually just thought ... and then, well it definitely gets harder to distinguish "thought objects" with "objects only in thought"; though I'm not contradicting you here, I would tend to agree we can start to make these distinctions (it just gets really hard, really fast, but we can justify that by saying it's because we don't normally think in this way, just as we don't normally think in quantum mechanical way so it is very hard).
I am however curious if you are working within a Kantian view, or you would want to point in another direction.
Quoting Janus
I agree with you here that "we'd want the truth to be that which we cannot disbelieve", but I am defending the view that we could just "disbelieve it anyway", as an act of will.
And I am not defending this view simply to make curious discussion, it seems an issue of the most critical political importance. The most powerful man in the world (or at least certainly very powerful) says one thing and then another in direct contradiction to the first, and seems to genuinely believe what he is saying each time. He has a following, that at first completely disoriented by this behaviour, (after he won) quickly got to work building an entirely new epistemological industry over night that claims feelings are a justification for factual beliefs. For me, in both cases, this is working backwards from an act of will to believe one thing to whatever is convenient to support those beliefs, and critical thinkers are mistaken to simply ignore this (even if none of these people argue their points on philosophy forum: because it is not convenient to believe they should subject themselves to critical scrutiny on philosophy forum) because ignoring this leads to a false world view where all political actors are of good faith.
Now, I don't want to put the discussion in a political direction, new threads can be made for that, but I do want to provide context that the views I'm defending have consequence. If we say "well of course we'll just dismiss the idea of lies as truth, or contradictions as good" as we need these ideas to do philosophy; we may indeed need these ideas to do philosophy, but we must also contend with (what seems to be) the fact that, in the political sphere, people don't agree with us nor see a need to do philosophy. And so if someone says "I ought to believe facts" we should not ontologically or epistemologically exclude there is some way, even if it is strange to us, to really believe "I ought to believe lies".
The purpose of so doing is not to label opponents as "those that believe they ought to believe lies", we can never know (I liar will usually say "I am no liar"), but rather to bring us to reflect on how our politics changes if there are such bad faith actors (from our point of view of wanting beliefs to pass critical scrutiny).
You have a point here, but does it preclude that facts ought to be believed?
But how can you ever know that it is True that the cat is on the mat?
What if what you think is a cat is not a cat but a fox that looks like a cat? What if what you think is a mat is not a mat but something else that looks like a mat because of some optical illusion? What if you were dreaming that the cat is on the mat, or you imagined it, or no one else but you saw it?
The issue I see with the idea of Truth is that it is unreachable. I see subjective truth, something that you or I believe is true. I see shared subjective truth, something that you and I believe is true. I see objective truth, a subjective truth that is shared by so many people that they dismiss those who do not share it with them as delusional. And that's it.
And what I have just said is of course my subjective truth, because I personally don't see anything that would contradict it. But I won't pretend that my subjective truth is Truth in the sense that it applies beyond my existence, because to me it is possible that someone somewhere might see something I don't see that makes them have a subjective truth that disagrees with mine.
Sure, I accept all that. So when I’ve been talking about objective truth and objective values then really I’ve been referring to transcendental truth and transcendental values.
You have a good point. That there is Truth does not necessarily mean that we have access to it. However, I don’t think this affects the OP argument, since it can still be the case that facts ought to be believed, even if we can never really know what is and is not a fact.
Indeed I think "not having access to Truth" in itself does not affect the OP argument, but the OP argument rests on the premise that "there are facts" (in the sense facts that are True, that ought to be believed), and to me we don't have to accept that very premise as True.
To me there is only the apparence of facts, that is things that many people agree on, but to me this is not proof that there is Truth. It could be that Truth is something that many of us imagine to exist, rather than something existing independently of us.
Then I would ask - if you truly do not think there is Truth that we have access to - why are you here? Why do you seek to adopt or express opinions and ideas about anything at all?
I think we have access to something, but that something is not the same depending on the person. I think each of us has their own reality, and in some aspects our realities overlap, and I find it interesting to discuss about where they overlap and where they differ, and how through speech we can influence the realities of others to some extent.
I used to believe that there is Truth, but I have failed to find evidence of it, rather it seems to me a lot of confusion and problems disappear if we stop assuming that there is Truth out there existing independently of us. Rather I believe that we create it ourselves, that we are involved.
But again I don't claim that what I say here is Truth, this is my own truth that I have formed after a lot of personal thinking and observations over the years.
I think that’s a prevaricatory way of saying there is no Truth but you behave as if there is.
It seems to me that a person who actually lived as if there were no Truth would collapse right where they were, to eventually die and rot away; because there’d be no reason for them to do anything else.
Well, I think it's worth thinking through that and making it explicit, as there's a really important point here. After all, science and the social sciences, and many other disciplines (i.e. 'every man and his dog'), wish to be validated with respect to objective facts, they thump the tub and demand 'but what of Objective Facts?!?' But I think only philosophy can ask 'what does "objective" mean'? and then have some further criteria against which to qualify the answer. And that answer appeals to what is transcendentally true, i.e. something true for all minds capable of grasping it, but intelligible only to a rational intellect (see Augustine on Intelligible Objects.) I think this is very near to a vital point about the Western philosophical tradition which is grasped by vanishingly few people.
Quoting boethius
As I mentioned, I think the wikipedia entry on Noumena is interesting, because it provides the etymological link between 'noumena' and that seminal Greek word 'nous'. So the 'noumenal object' is really rather more like the 'ideal form' in the sense of an 'intellectual object' - or a "concept" in the true sense of the word (which is often bandied about but rarely appreciated.) It is, in a sense, what can be 'directly perceived by nous' - but what is directly percieved by nous is not 'the object of perception' but the ideal forms, of which any particular is but an representation.
I don't think Kant explicitly recognises the forms, in a Platonic sense - he was initially Platonist but came to reject the platonic forms later in his career. So he certainly wouldn't have agreed with my reading, which is more Thomistic. But, what I'm attracted to, is actually what is called hylomorphism, or matter-form dualism. I found this really intriguing passage on a Thomist website here which I have mentioned a number of times on this forum, but unfortunately nobody seemed to be interested. But it seems very profound to me, based on the idea that the 'intelligible forms' of things are what the intellect knows directly, and then combines with the 'sensory perception' to arrive at judgement. I find it infinitely more appealing than Cartesianism.
No, because there is my personal truth, and I act on it. But I don't pretend that it is objective, that it is embedded in an universe that exists independently of us, or that others ought to agree with me.
I behave based on what I believe, based on my personal view of existence, I have beliefs, but I don't believe that others ought to believe what I believe, and I don't need a Truth to find a reason to do something, I just need my personal truth.
Sure I believe for instance that when I'm thirsty I need to drink some sort of liquid to stop being thirsty. That doesn't mean I believe that any being ought to drink to quench their thirst.
I have found that people can function well while having incompatible and contradicting beliefs between one another. If they live by having very different truths, what is Truth?
The Truth is the transcendental Truth; it is what it is regardless how many different personal “truths” there are.
Other than that I’d just repeat my last response to you. Probably we should just draw a line under this now.
Do you have examples?
Then if some people do not see these examples as examples of truth, how would you prove it to them that they are Truth?
Yes, I agree with what you say, and that has been my view from the start: that there is a transcendental truth (which I was calling “objective”), that objective facts are a part of this, that they can be accessed and understood, and that a necessary part of those facts is that they ought to be believed.
Your mention of intelligible forms is pertinent. Many of the problems in this discussion I feel have been because of a general failure to consider Truth abstracted from any concrete example; to consider a fact as something that participates in the Truth, rather than a material instance of something.
That isn’t a pertinent question. The transcendental Truth is what it is regardless of what I can say or prove.
You can believe what you want to believe, but still from my point of view I don't see evidence of that Truth. It is true to you that there is Truth, while it is true to me that there is no Truth, which I see as evidence that truth is personal, and not as evidence that there is Truth.
The argument in the OP rests on the premise that Truth exists, so I felt it important to point out that this premise is not true for everyone, considering that the conclusion of the argument is that there are objective values that apply to everyone.
Here you're adding "transcendental." Are you also alluding to religious ideas? Otherwise what is the function of "transcendental" here?
Maybe this is your definition of "transcendental truth"? "The Truth is the transcendental Truth; it is what it is regardless how many different personal 'truths' there are." If so, what does capital-T "Truth" refer to without the word "transcendental" in front of it? Or is it that "transcendental Truth " is akin to saying something like "unmarried bachelor"?
Quoting AJJ
What would that be referring to?
Also I would like to say that I do hope there is some Truth, not in the sense that there is a Truth that exists independently of us, but in the sense that we all participate in creating the world, in shaping our reality and the realities of others. And this idea that there is no Truth existing independently of us doesn't have to leave us feeling powerless, on the contrary if we are the ones shaping the world then we are potentially omnipotent, the world is what we make it, Truth is what we make it, God resides in each one of us if you will. But until others see it as Truth it won't be Truth, it will remain my personal truth.
That kind of talk creeps me out.
Why? The idea that we are collectively responsible for the way the world is? That a human being can do both good and terrible things? That there is no absolute standard independent of us we can rely on?
If we cannot but believe something we acknowledge as fact, doesn't that leave the only place for an "ought" as consisting in the condition that we ought to acknowledge facts as facts? If there is any doubt that some proposition is a fact, then how can it be determined that it ought to be acknowledged as such?
I can only speak from my own experience, and I find myself incapable of willfully disbelieving anything that I see as being a fact. The question is what must I acknowledge as factual and on the basis of what must I acknowledge it?
Yes, that sounds right.
Quoting Janus
Perhaps it couldn’t be determined, but whatever the fact is it would be the case that you ought to believe it.
Perhaps an example or two for examination would help.
Yes, I have no problem believing you value facts, just as with AJJ.
My point here is that we're not forced to. We can just see contradictory things and believe them both. Now, whether each thing warrants belief in itself, that "we have to ascertain that something is in fact a fact", we might say "doesn't change the fact that these two contradictory facts cannot both be true".
To give names to the positions I'm discussing. An "epistimic determinist" would believe that once someone is aware of a contradiction they cannot believe both things simultaneously. They would probably conclude this because they themselves try to unwind or resolve contradiction when they see it, and assume everyone does likewise.
My point of view is thus "epistimic indeterminism", that there is no necessary connection between what we see as true and what we believe. We are capable of seeing a contradiction and believing it doesn't warrant unwinding or resolution, and so continue to believe in both contradictory propositions. We are capable of seeing the law-of-non-contradiction itself and believing it's not true. Philosophers generally agree this leads to incoherent world views, but we can see that our world view is incoherent and have no problem in believing it anyways.
I don’t think those questions are relevant here,
since the OP isn’t about how we come to know facts.
If facts ought to be believed/acknowledged then the OP argument works, stating that if there are no objective values then there can therefore be no facts. It seems obvious that there are facts, so there must be objective values.
Many people are convinced they hold Truth, yet their truths contradict one another, but they believe they hold the real Truth and that the other side is wrong, and they will defend their Truth at all costs. So by believing in Truth, we have the problem that people attempt to impose their Truth and fight one another to make their Truth prevail. This leads to indoctrination, oppression, wars, genocides, ...
A finite set of observations can be explained in an arbitrarily large number of ways, in an arbitrarily large number of theories, so we won't ever find only one theory that fits all the available evidence. Not believing in Truth removes the problem of which theory is correct, we just have to pick the most practical one or the one that best suits our needs.
Because a finite set of observations can be explained in an arbitrarily large number of ways, we can always arrange to see new evidence as consistent with our Truth, which is one of the reasons why many people won't let go of their Truth, to them it fits the evidence perfectly. And if people can't be convinced that their Truth may not be the Truth, how could we ever know when we've found the Truth, if it even exists?
When people agree on a Truth, it reinforces their conviction that it is the real Truth, and they see those who disagree with them as suffering from delusions, and if they fail to convince them they label them as mentally ill, and use this label to justify treating them in inhumane ways.
We don't stop seeing a Truth as Truth until we find some evidence that we are willing to see as contradicting that Truth, but until we see this evidence we are not aware of it, so there is always the possibility that there is something we are not yet aware of that would contradict this Truth, and so again even if we're sure we found the Truth it may be contradicted later on.
We don't have direct access to what other people experience, at least I don't, I only guess what others experience based on what I experience, but then it is possible some people see things I don't see, and that I see things that some people don't see, that our realities are different in some profound aspects, in a similar way that someone who is blind has a very different reality from someone who is not, and then if I believe I've found the Truth how could I know if it applies to people who see things differently?
So for all these reasons, and probably some others I'm not thinking of at the moment, I believe that truth is personal, that Truth is a mirage that leads to confusion, conflicts, suffering, and that people would be more compassionate and listen more to others if they stopped believing in an idea of Truth that exists out there independently from their existence.
And then if people stop believing in such a Truth they will start seeing themselves as responsible for what they do and how they treat others, rather than using Truth to justify doing the worse atrocities, as if that Truth was greater than themselves and they were just servants following its orders. If they see truth as coming from themselves, then they are the ones responsible for how they shape the world, them and not some superior principle existing out there.
How do we become convinced that facts are facts? Even if we accept that we are under a rational obligation to believe facts, that still leaves open the question as to how we are to ascertain that something is a fact. And my earlier point was that if we do ascertain beyond doubt that something is a fact, then I remain unconvinced, despite what has been said by that we can acknowledge that the something certainly is a fact, and yet disbelieve it.
So, if this is right, then it is not a matter of saying that we ought to believe facts, but that we cannot but believe anything that we have ascertained, acknowledged and continue to acknowledge to be a fact. I say "continue to acknowledge" because I think the only way we could disbelieve something we have ascertained and acknowledged to be a fact would be via finding new evidence which disqualifies the thing's facthood or by a failure of memory; that is by forgetting, perhaps willfully, perhaps unconsciously, the acknowledgement. Also, we need to distinguish between disbelief which is the mere failure to believe, and disbelief which consists in actively believing the contrary or contradictory.
Quoting boethius
It's not clear what sort of things you have in mind; could you give some examples to clarify your point?
How we come to know a fact is a fact isn’t relevant to the OP argument. If you’re on a jury and you’re choosing which story to believe, the prosecution or the defence, then you know you ought to believe the true one. Whether or not you know which one that is is beside the point here, since that doesn’t change where the obligation lies.
This statement seems to have premise, that facts ought to be believed.
Also, I'm not arguing AJJ's premise is false, that facts ought to be believed, I believe it is universally true, nor arguing with his conclusion that, since facts ought to be believed, we ought to believe the fact that facts ought to be believed.
I wouldn't use the word "objective", because it usually has connotation of "we'll agree with enough discussion" (which is what I don't believe is a fact), but AJJ and I have since clarified that his use of the word objective is the same as using my use of universal here.
My position is that people don't necessarily share this ethical theory in an ontological sense of having this deterministic epistemological belief, that facts ought to be believed, by default.
Quoting Janus
If you ever deal with someone who is in denial about a drug problem, or other bad habits, or in denial about their "expert skill level" being a reckless attitude, or in denial about some hope that has been empirically revealed to be not-true, and especially if you care for that person, it may become painfully obvious how people are capable of believing contradictory things: that sure drugs are a problem but they don't have a problem, etc.
What is of much more concern to me is contradictions on the political level.
It is a common view among our historians that propagandists usually fall victim to their own propaganda. By this they mean that propagandists end up really believing what they must have been aware are lies when they invented them the first time.
Let's take the fairly common belief among the Nazi's that they were invincible. Where did it come from?
[quote=Hitler, A, Mein Kampf, p. 387]‘then a day would come when a nation of citizens would arise which would be welded together through a common love and a common pride that would be invincible and indestructible forever.’[/quote]
Now, Hitler is being subtle here. He's not saying they are invincible now, which he knows makes not sense ... but we'll be invincible later. And, no way to verify this fact, maybe he did really believe it the moment he conceived of it.
But what of his agents of the state? Now, being good Nazi's, they would want to achieve Hitler's vision, and so teach others, especially the young, that the day has come that we really are welded together through a common love and a common pride that would be invincible and indestructible forever.
However, these agents of the state, did they really believe it? Certainly it didn't pass any standard of critical scrutiny. They just lost WWI. They also are aware that if 1 storm trooper can die, n + 1 storm troopers can die, until they are all dead. They even need the belief that they aren't invincible in order to execute battle plans in any reasonable way. Even a Hitler youth was still taught enough critical thinking skills (so that he would be a good soldier) to be able to make these reasonings, that the Nazi regime isn't invincible nor could it ever be.
So why did people believe it? First, because Hitler told them to and they believe they should do and believe what Hitler says (and if we look at this more fundamental belief, we will probably expect to find it is based on more lies). Second, if they do reflect critically upon this belief in itself, instead of reasoning that it's absurd, they may say "maybe it isn't true, only time can tell, but what is true is every German should believe it so that confidence and zeal in battle is a maximum, so chances to win the war are at a maximum precisely because we are not invincible we need to do everything we can to maximize our chances as the war should be won".
I contend someone really can believe this is a true and sound argument, and since they too are a German and "all Germans ought to believe this lie that they are invincible" then they too come to believe the lie because good Germans ought to believe this lie and they are a good German.
And if you look at that argument, you will see it is based on the premise that the Nazi's aren't invincible, but concludes with the belief that the Nazi's are invincible.
In all my years of having a serious interest in philosophy, it hasn't once struck me as useful or worthwhile to make a distinction between truth with a lowercase 't' and Truth with an upper case 'T'. There's simply truth. My distinction between truth and fact is standard in the correspondence theory of truth, and conventionally it's considered a category error to apply truth-values to facts: there are no true or false facts. Your question doesn't even make sense. I could ask you the same thing.
And does it even matter if I use "fact" where you use "Truth"? Nope. The difference is trivial and not worth arguing over. So what exactly is your motive here?
It also seems wrong to keep pressing people on the meaning of certain terms to the point of absurdity, and then acting as though this is a fault with [i]their[/I] position. If you seriously claim not to know what a fact is, or any of the other synonymous phrases you mentioned earlier, I would question your level of intelligence or your genuineness.