Leontiskos

I still think the terminal question is about the relation of mind, truth, and world. Is mind accidental to the world or not? Then depending on how one...

- Make sure to use earplugs with that sand.

...and if there are no true sentences, then there is no truth. In which case my description of your illustration is perfectly accurate, "That gold exi...

- See: And sure, you continue to refuse to talk about truth and instead want to merely talk about utterances, but my whole point is that you need to s...

Right.

Sure you have. You have substantially elevated the level of discourse in this thread, and I don't think the nature of truth is something that one can ...

- Okay, but your distinction between universe A and B is ad hoc for the purposes of predication. What began as a simple contradiction, "It is true and...

Right: - There are two ways to go here. On the one hand we could say that ancients and moderns both ask what is good, but the moderns also do somethin...

Here is what you said earlier, which is both better and contradictory to what you are saying now: - I am saying that when you assert that gold exists ...

I think you and @"Moliere" are doing little more than trading in ambiguities. If you are not, then be straightforward about you claims. "Ancient and m...

And yet your view entails it. You say that in the cases we are speaking about, "gold still exists but nothing has the property of being true or false....

Yes, and even in logic univocity founders. @"J"'s thread on Kimhi, where the univocity of p in the first two premises of a modus ponens is questioned,...

- You've clearly tied yourself in knots.

And by that you mean that it is true.

But now you should go on to ask yourself how it is that you are claiming, "(It is true that) gold still exists but nothing has the property of being t...

You're using a shotgun approach and hoping you hit something. I want a single criticism, not four. No, I don't see that one can statistically predict ...

This is a helpful argument, but this is what I said earlier regarding C3: That is, supposing the latter half of P1 represents a truth, the absence of ...

"What does it mean to be good/virtuous" is not a question that begins (exists?) with the moderns. This is a wholly different issue than Hume's charact...

I was listening to Edward Feser recently, and he argued that the modern abandonment of teleology left morality in a lurch. Severed from its teleologic...

So are you saying that you do not grant the first premise? You think the argument is valid but the first premise is false? Better to give a precise cr...

To place bread in front of someone who is hungry does not involve me in any "oughts", just "is's," and yet we know exactly what the person will do. Th...

Fortunately at this point in the thread everyone is simply ignoring your plea to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" Such is always only...

But what is continually happening is that folks are sneaking in (2) despite (1). So there is a human in a world without humans, and there is language ...

@"Janus", here is a different but related idea that Paine cited two years ago:

I don't think Hume's guillotine ever chopped, and it certainly doesn't chop for the herd. If you place food in front of a poor starving person, they w...

What people deem to be good is predictable. What is predictable is not arbitrary. Therefore what people deem to be good is not arbitrary. So as a firs...

It is interesting that Banno looks like a Platonist, with self-subsistent truths floating independently of any minds. There is something about this th...

Sorry, I committed and then fixed a bad typo, but apparently not quickly enough. Cannot can.

- Nah, you are just begging the question again. That "truth" is a meta-truth of the possible world space that we are conceptualizing, not necessarily ...

If that is the point at issue then presumably you disagree with what I take to be uncontroversial, no? In that case you would claim that <existence ca...

So are you are saying that a world without any minds still has truths, just not affirmations?

Okay, and do you also agree with this: You cite Schopenhauer and Berkeley. Are you agreeing with them in toto?

There I believe we argued over whether the shape of a boulder is mind-dependent in the sense that it relies upon perception. We can infer that balls k...

Sure, but that does not commit me to your claim that there are truths about the existence of gold even if there are no minds.

My point applies either way. None of the alternative phrasings evade the fact that you are positing truths without minds. "Whatever the case, there wi...

For the proximate argument, supposing that the only minds that exist are human, and all (human) minds cease to exist, it does not follow that the exis...

But you already said that <here>, and we already went on to talk about it. Yes, it begs the question as to whether truth is undisturbed when minds dis...

Do any devil's advocate questions demand answers? On a philosophy forum the question of the OP should probably be phrased, "Why ought one do anything ...

Is one able to predict with some level of accuracy what others will deem good? If so, how could the good be arbitrary or disconnected from "extrinsic ...

@"Janus" has tried a few different tacks, but one of them is that a claim about the future can be true now even if it is not true in the future. I don...

No, I don't think so: This is a clear affirmation of truth where there is no proposition, and it is the basis of the discussion.

It depends what you mean by a sentence or a proposition. If I say, "It is true that it is raining," I am not talking about a sentence, I am talking ab...

I think the key here is that in Plato's time a selfish doctrine was generally recognized as being unvirtuous and immoral. With Machiavelli we begin to...

I think that's the same problem. It would seem that to say, "Tomorrow X will exist," involves saying, "Tomorrow it will be true that X exists." Simila...

Why does it seem that way to you?

Yes, I think that's a fairly important point. :up: This is also why a firm grounding for knowledge tends to escape naturalists (and especially materia...

- Yes, that is a fair way to put it. We also want to ask whether it makes sense for someone to say that X will exist while simultaneously denying that...

Discussions in the religion forum are only "veiled" theology for those who don't know where they are. It is worthwhile to ask whether free will is coh...

Or maybe just Humeans avoid it. Ethicists who do not use the word or concept 'good' are probably not doing ethics at all.

Have you noticed that you haven't produced an actual argument for your claim that the sentence is vacuous? You just keep asserting that it is so, with...