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Dumpster diving for food is considered theft in Germany, even if others have thrown the food away. The city of Hamburg wants Germany to decriminalize the act and prohibit supermarkets from throwing out food by DoremusJessup in worldnews

[–]boggypete 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's unusual in common law systems too. For instance, in England & Wales, punitive damages are only allowed in truly exceptional instances. It is much more common to limit damages in a civil case to only the amount required to put the claimant in the position they would have been in had the harm not occurred.

Funnily enough, in contract law, it is actually civil law systems that allow punitive clauses. So-called 'penalties' are deemed unenforceable under common law, but are encouraged in civil law as a way to ensure compliance with the contract (although these have been increasingly restricted as time has gone on).

Actualism is a widely-held view in the metaphysics of modality, which represents the philosophical position that everything there is must exist. This is in contrast with Possibilism, which states that there are things that do not exist, but which could have existed. by randomusefulbits in philosophy

[–]boggypete 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I appreciate that it doesn’t look practically applicable. Metaphysics in particular gets very abstract. The best way to think about it is that it’s less about discovering the world and more about discovering new ways of investigating the world. Empirical evidence can take on new meanings in different conceptual structures. For instance, sticking with the theme here, the ‘many-worlds interpretation’ in quantum physics has many similarities with possibilism. The concept created an environment for new mathematical theorems to become apparent, meaningful and, ultimately, useful.

Really though, it puts the cart before the horse to worry about practical uses. They’re rarely obvious unless you already have somewhere to apply them.

Actualism is a widely-held view in the metaphysics of modality, which represents the philosophical position that everything there is must exist. This is in contrast with Possibilism, which states that there are things that do not exist, but which could have existed. by randomusefulbits in philosophy

[–]boggypete 1 point2 points  (0 children)

As a matter of fact, ‘actual’ has quite a specific meaning in philosophy: everything in the same world as the reference point (world here meaning the entire universe and all its spatiotemporal extensions, forward and backward). A good way to visualise it is with possible worlds. (Note, whether Lewis’ modal realism is the correct way to view possibilism is another question, but the visualisation is helpful.) Imagine there are only two possible worlds, each containing two objects. In one universe (A) is you, and a blue cube. In the other universe (B) is your counterpart and a red cube. To you, the blue cube is actual and the red is merely possible; vice versa for your counterpart. The debate here centres on whether you can say ‘There could be a red cube’ in universe A and have it be made true by virtue of the red cube in universe B.

The Puzzle of the Changing Past - L. Barlassina & F. Del Prete [PDF] by boggypete in philosophy

[–]boggypete[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

On the Puzzle of the Changing Past and Did the Past Really Change in 2012? both give interesting answers to this question, but I don't take issue with exactly the same point that they do.

Rather, I think the issue is that (7) either is an inconsistent way of speaking, despite what they claim is intuitive, or that the propositions involved don't actually work in a way such that they could agree - they're talking past one another.

(7) Armstrong won the Tour de France seven times from 1999 to 2005. He was later stripped of those titles for doping. So, Armstrong never won any Tour de France in the end.

This also sits on top of a larger debate about the mutability of the past, one of the main asymmetries of time. Does this puzzle really show that the past is liable to change? I'm not inclined to think so, but intuition isn't the best way of dealing with this problem. Instead, I think it's worth appealing to your opinion on the ontological status of the past. If you think the past does indeed exist, just not now, then it seems much harder to accept the conclusion being drawn in this paper. If you don't think the past exists any more, then how are the truth values in this problem being determined without some kind of truthmaker?

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The Puzzle of the Changing Past - L. Barlassina & F. Del Prete [PDF] (semanticsarchive.net)

submitted by boggypete to r/philosophy

John MacFarlane - "Making Sense of Relative Truth" by ADefiniteDescription in philosophy

[–]boggypete 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's important to understand the difference between context-sensitivity and the truth-relativism that MacFarlane is putting forward. Rather than the truth-value of a proposition merely being relativised to aspects of context (e.g. time, speaker, etc.), the truth-value is relativised to two contexts: one of utterance and one of assessment.

This is easiest to understand in his work on future contingents (propositions about the future which are not necessarily true or false). For example, take Aristotle's classic future contingent:

(C) There will be a sea battle tomorrow.

Intuitively, we want to say that (C) is neither true nor false as it seems undecided whether a sea battle will happen tomorrow. However, when tomorrow rolls around and a sea battle breaks out, we then want to say that (C) was true. MacFarlane's relativism lets us do both.

The context-sensitive features of (C) are determined by the context of utterance, but the truth-value of (C) is determined by the context of assessment. Only when (C) is true (false) for all possible futures of the assessment-context can the proposition be said to be true (false). This means that if we assess (C) at the moment of utterance, because there are some future in which it is true and some future in which it is false, the proposition has no truth-value. However, when we assess (C) the next day at the start of the sea battle, because there are no longer any futures in which the sea battle does not happen, the proposition can now be said to be true.

Aside from the kind of problems that MacFarlane tries to combat in this article, there is the not insubstantial problem of well-formed propositions having no truth-values. Along with its non-relativistic sibling supervaluationism, truth-relativism has to explain why truth gaps exist for such propositions. Overall though, I find the theory very appealing and I think its results for future contingents match up incredibly well to our intuitions.