Monistic systems lead to explosion
This is a branch from another thread. Could you explain a little more about how this works, @Cheshire ?
"I'm saying foundationalism/monistic systems lead to explosion. And relativistic truth implies constraint. Where is the correct position of the first puzzle piece? It's anywhere and nowhere. The last one is determined. I'll take the system that relies on the other pieces." -Cheshire
@frank
Pretty simple idea. Strip away all the ideas while looking for a cornerstone and you lose all the constraints to corroborate truth. It's an attempt to demonstrate that knowledge isn't built up with a system of truth stacked on truth, but rather judged within the constraints of other tentative ideas. Using the analogy of a puzzle.
Taking a foundationalist approach and disregarding other things we think of as being known is explosive in the sense you have to disregard things you already accept. Which seems contradictory by nature to me.
"I'm saying foundationalism/monistic systems lead to explosion. And relativistic truth implies constraint. Where is the correct position of the first puzzle piece? It's anywhere and nowhere. The last one is determined. I'll take the system that relies on the other pieces." -Cheshire
@frank
Pretty simple idea. Strip away all the ideas while looking for a cornerstone and you lose all the constraints to corroborate truth. It's an attempt to demonstrate that knowledge isn't built up with a system of truth stacked on truth, but rather judged within the constraints of other tentative ideas. Using the analogy of a puzzle.
Taking a foundationalist approach and disregarding other things we think of as being known is explosive in the sense you have to disregard things you already accept. Which seems contradictory by nature to me.
Comments (39)
Wittgenstein argued that since logical truths are necessary truths, they have nothing to do with the world, because if P is necessarily true, it's compatible with any way the world might be.
That's my stab at trying to grasp what you're saying?
Quoting Cheshire
Like what?
So what if the LNC isn't really a law. It still applies enough of the time to consider it a constraint on any conclusions.
I'm not sure we can conceive an exception to the LNC. Think of quantum theory. All this time and no one has seriously considered it as an exception. We just assume there's something we haven't learned that would solve the problem.
A really good one? A good what?
Quoting Cheshire
I think we call the LNC necessary because we can't conceive an exception. It's not like we thought: "let's ordain this thing!". Right?
A really good exception.
Quoting frank
It's only "necessary" in monistic or foundational; whatever the word for 'correct' in an academic sense seems most appropriate. Hence, it's that system that promotes explosion. I can tolerate 'laws' not holding occasionally in a relativistic view of logical law.
Honestly, I don't think I can. If it looks like the LNC isn't holding for me, I'd wonder if I just had a stroke. :razz:
Right, it's not the strength of the principle rather the thing that's being contradicted. Save self-consistent systems like mathematics where dropping a few laws would probably make a mess of things. In the real world of nuance and context it's the nuance and context. The LNC is a pattern we notice in it, not some meta causal force that makes our arguments correct by force.
Yet the objection is explosion? That's more radical than suggesting the law doesn't hold periodically.
Could you explain that again? Sorry if I'm a little dense.
You're saying that a monistic system has no constraints on truth?
I'm saying the counter argument to the denial of the LNC is explosion from a monistic system. It wants to be correct so bad that it's willing to claim an exception would completely unravel the whole of human knowledge. It's an argument that tries to imply absurdity while being absurd. There's no reason to think a counter instance of the LNC suddenly flips all correspondence to truth on its head. Or that anything can be true if we let in a contradiction. It's over essentialized. It's not necessary for it to hold completely for things to retain a truth value. Or not.
I guess if we aren't committed to the LNC, we don't have to be committed to the principle of explosion.
Thanks for the follow up. :up:
What sense of 'explosion' is being used here? Destruction or multiplication...?
What is LNC? Sorry, probably should know. Oh, Law of Non-Contradiction?
Oh, you mean anything follows from a contradiction! So explosion in that sense. Sorry, I think I've just caught up.
EDIT: So, what's that got to do with monism? The LNC isn't usually claimed to be a substance, even if it is foundational in some sense.
A monistic view of logic. I take it to mean that logical law is flawless or ought be treated that way. There's plenty of semantic room for other or better terms. It stems from a Logical Nihilism discussion frank and I were privy to.
St. Thomas Aquinas would be another example. He allows for different tools and acts of thought relevant to different subjects, but proposes that they are all unified. He doesn't seek a foundation to "build up from," though, proposing sense wonder, not LNC, as the first principle of science/philosophy.
Just to exercise my understanding of Cheshire's view, he's using "foundationalism" to refer to an approach that builds up from within. It's a Cartesian view that our foundations are deep within our minds, waiting to be revealed through contemplation. Descartes, through the wax exercise, shows that true understanding does not come from the senses, but from the mind.
Cheshire is saying that this view, that may cement logical monism, especially in the sense of using logical principles as laws, is an internalist conceit. Cheshire points to the way classical logic is self-contained and self-protecting. It's a castle built on air, and potentially leaving us deluded.
Cheshire would prefer to see us start from where we are, here in the world, with our problems in view instead of down in a brain-vat.
Well, historically, this is how logic was developed (both Aristotlean and the parallel Stoic development).
Questions of truth sit in the bucket of "metaphysics," and generally lie external to logic. Obviously, they are related, since we have the questions: "what does it mean to reason from true premises to necessarily true conclusions," or "what are we preserving in truth-preserving arguments?" But, in general, the claim isn't that a logic is defining truth, except instrumentally.
This is why there were charges from Putnam and others that STT was "philosophically sterile."
What's absurd about it? Contradictions allow you to demonstrate anything through disjunctive syllogism. The rules that allow for this seem very innocuous and disjunctive syllogism appears highly reliable when put to practical applications. Further, without very careful and recent work, removing LNC seemed to require removing the Law of Identity and LEM, and thus seemed to result in there being no necessarily truth-preserving inferences at all (no logic).
So, you have these issues on the one hand, and on the other the question of "can something both be and not be in exactly the same way without qualification." The intuitive answer seems to be "no," normally when we say something both is and is-not we qualify these statements (e.g. "President of the USA can be predicated of Trump as well as its negation, in a qualified sense, because he is a former, but not current president let's hope this example ages well lol).
We might challenge the principle, but I don't think it's prima facie absurd. It's at the very least instructive, as with Curry Paradoxes.
Our world is profoundly Cartesian, though.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I wasn't talking about monism leading to delusion about the world, but about the nature of thought. I guess it's more a philosophical issue rather than the danger people will walk into telephone poles. :cool:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Deflationists would take that as a compliment. There hasn't been any serious attempt to go back to correspondence theory. It's defunct.
In post-modern programs maybe, but that itself is a "camp" that appears to be in significant decline (the "Spirit of 68," having lost its resonance I suppose, or maybe condemning itself through birthing the modern globalized world and neoliberalism). I imagine deflation would fair significantly worse amongst scientists and the general public than it does amongst philosophers (polled below).
Anyhow, there are many options aside from correspondence.
Neoliberalism didn't come from post-modernism. It came from Hayek and brainless western leftists.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
True enough.
Can you get one of those paper referred to there so we can see what they're talking about?
It's a survey done in 2009 and 2020
https://survey2020.philpeople.org/
You can see all the questions and correlations. On this topic, it isn't that surprising. If people accept deflation on truth they tend to be more open to anti-realisms of other varieties as well, moral, causal, etc. (Presumably because one can argue from one form of anti-realism to others in some cases, but I also think one's conception of "the human good," the "good life" and "freedom" play into this distinction).
I suppose one interesting thing is that correspondence still enjoys a majority for specialists in logic (versus about a quarter for deflation). It is similar for epistemology, and then correspondence does better in metaphysics (+60%) while deflation actually enjoys a small advantage for people specializing in Continental philosophy.
My favorite question is: What is the aim of philosophy (which is most important?): happiness, understanding, truth/knowledge, wisdom, or goodness/justice?
To which the ancient and medieval philosopher replies: "those are all the same thing!" :rofl:
This is definitely not true. I'd suggest we get to the bottom of what your data is actually showing. Who are the respondents?
English speaking (not necessarily as a first language) academic philosophers from around the world.
This doesn't seem that implausible to me. I have used a few intro logic textbooks and intermediate ones and none talk about deflation or normative interpretations of logic except as quick asides (if at all). Plus, mathematics, which seems adjacent, seems to have the similar responses for this and related topics.
You might be interested in the question on classical or non-classical logics or the one on nominalism vs Platonism on abstract objects.
Another interesting trend is that the further you go back in time for speciality era the less people think philosophy "makes progress."
If you're interested in the topic, I recommend an overview of philosophy of truth since Frege. A good one is Understanding Truth by Scott Soames. I get that I'm just some random stranger on the internet, but for what it's worth, I'm telling you there's a big misunderstanding looming in your view on this.
Well, the 2009 survey results are pretty similar and those were based on the academic departments/sub-departments people work in at the top programs from Philosophical Gourmet Report. If there was a sampling error in the broader 2020 population, it just seems like it would vary more from the broader polling
I'm just telling you that your data does not represent the view in contemporary philosophy. Let's look at a specific responder and analyze exactly what they're saying. I don't think you want to take anonymous data over an actual overview of the topic by a recognized specialist like Soames.
Ok, but to be clear, it's not anonymous, it's just confidential. That is how they're able to do longitudinal analysis. Actually, IIRC people could make their answers public, but the data is not easily searchable because you just get a list of names.
Either the folks who responded that they accept correspondence theory didn't understand the question, or they interpreted "correspondence" in some creative way. Correspondence is not accepted by anyone who's familiar with the topic. It's fairly straightforward to demonstrate that truth can't be analyzed in that way. Believe it or don't. :wink:
Might it be that you are thinking of the question in too narrow a way and not they collectively misunderstanding it?
Which topic? It remains the most popular conception in metaphysics, of that I'm quite confident.
What's the demonstration?
Since I don't know who they were or why they responded as they did, there's no way to resolve the question.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
What makes you think this?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm in the middle of a project. I think you'd find Soames' book to be a great investment. Plus you can get his books about the history of AP, although he said something about Davidson that didn't turn out to be correct.
Lots of reading, graduate school experience, that sources like IEP and SEP will state this as uncontroversial and people like to complain if they get things wrong, the polling data, etc.
Are you thinking of correspondence narrowly as just Bertrand Russell's work, Moore, etc? That might be the disconnect. The term gets used broadly for all theories that attempt to explain truth in something like a corresponding relationship to reality, e.g. "it is currently raining outside," is true if water is falling from the sky outside.
We're done. :smile:
:up:
BTW, I agree with you here. I feel like there have been knock down arguments against correspondence for millennia at this point, e.g. Plotinus asks how one might step outside one's beliefs and experiences to compare them with the world. Yet it has trucked along nonetheless.
But I think this has to do more with vague commitments to realism. Maybe not though, truth-maker theories (facts, states of affairs, etc.) seem pretty popular.
Yes, but not in a tactical sense. Didn't realize it was a point of contention.
I wouldn't put it that well, but yes, that's essentially what I'm saying. Perhaps not start with our imagination.
It seems to me that the problem with some people's understanding of correspondence rules it our while a more sensible understanding makes it central to human life. Even Tarski's 'T-sentence' essentially expresses the logic of correspondence. The sentence "snow is white" is true if an only if snow is white. (As Aristotle would have it "to say of what is so that it is so" (loosely paraphrased).
The reality being corresponded to is not the arcane reality of the "in itself" but the ordinary empirical reality of human experience. Of course we can't check to see if our assertions correspond to the imagined (for us) reality of the in itself, but we can at least in prinicple check whether our assertions correspond to the common human experience and judgement we share and inhabit.
Yes, I think you're correct, one can think of correspondence in a looser sense and I think it is in this looser sense that it remains so popular amongst philosophers. And one can add notions of pragmatism, coherence, or identity to the correspondence view without necessarily altering its core intuition.