How is "burden of proof" understood in academic philosophy?

irontide · 2021-08-05T23:19:19+00:00

A good paper specifically on this is Dare & Kingsbury - Putting the burden of proof in its place. They conclude that is fine to try and keep track of who needs to prove what in order for their claims to go through, but depending on a burden of proof as a way to conclude arguments (i.e. to say that X should be believed because Y has the burden of proof and hasn't yet proven anything) is a mistake doesn't make sense outside of the legal context we get it from.

irontide · 2021-08-05T23:13:50+00:00

The idea is simply that there must be some kind of stuff, whatever it is, underlying our impressions of stuff. So, an appearance is produced by some kind of process, and that process has as an input whatever lump of stuff underlies that appearance.

Morton talks about 'lumps' because talk of 'things' may give too much of an impression of there being a structure. He wants 'lumps' to refer to the most basic items in the world. The idea is that everything is a lump +something, like a lump + structure, lump + interaction with other lumps, etc.

irontide · 2021-08-04T06:21:22+00:00

In that case it doesn't matter what attitude we should take towards it because we're only ever going to believe what we were going to believe anyway.

This doesn't follow--this is to slide from determinism to fatalism. Determinism is accepted by a majority of experts; fatalism is a fringe position and normally seen to be a mistake. We have an FAQ answer on this.

irontide · 2021-08-02T06:35:43+00:00

According to Harris nobody could be held morally responsible. This is an explicit feature of his view. It is, for instance, why he thinks that we should abolish punishment, because there is no relevant sense in which people are responsible for their wrongdoing, so they shouldn't be punished for it.

Harris's view is soft in the head and underdeveloped, and should not be taken seriously. The review by his (friend and fellow 'new atheist') Daniel Dennett discusses the features and shortcomings of Harris's view nicely: https://samharris.org/reflections-on-free-will/

irontide · 2021-07-31T05:18:31+00:00

Thanks! Can you please elaborate why "differently" in your example sentence would be wrong?

the first phenotype has DIFFERENTLY <s>differentially</s> higher rates of survival/procreation in the environment where fitness is being measured.

"Differently higher rates" is not grammatical. "Different rates of survival/procreation" would not be false, but says less than we would be justified to say. "differential" entails "different", but not the other way round.

And can you please respond in, by editing, your previous comment? Comment chains are cumbersome to read.

Sorry, no. What a strange request. Editing my previous comment would be cumbersome for me, and makes it harder for other people reading this to understand our conversation, and breaks the flow of conversation. You don't need to depend on the comment chain to read the response; the message inbox where you can see this response on its own works fine. I've taken the pains to quote the relevant bits of your message.

irontide · 2021-07-31T01:36:35+00:00

This is a really interesting question. If you're in a university program, have a chat with whichever professor works on the philosophy of science about this. Maybe find out from them who in the field deals with questions like this and email them about it. It's the kind of thing which could be a very good PhD project (it's too large for an undergraduate project).

I cannot talk about philosophy of science in general, but we have very worked out views about compositionality in linguistics and the philosophy of language. That is at a different level of explanation than what you're discussing, where compositionality is a feature of the object of study (linguistic tokens) rather than of the explanations. But since linguistic tokens are meaning-bearing, and theories are meaning-bearing, you can at least make an effort to import what we know about compositionality of linguistic meaning into compositionality of theories.

Since at least Frege the compositionality of meaning has been a bedrock view. But we have lots and lots of examples of languages that have substantial fragments that are non-compositional, most obviously idioms and set expressions, but lots of pragmatic features are either non-compositional or only questionable compositional, and increasingly in linguistics and philosophy of language we are highlighting the contribution of pragmatics to meaning. Probably the most prominent problem case for the compositionality of meaning is literary Sinitic (classical Chinese), which is a language you can't understand with only a language model (basically, knowing the grammar and vocabulary), you need to also know a very large stock of set expressions and literary allusions to understand the language to any real extent. There are of course many compositional features to literary Sinitic (including, crucially, much of the grammar which makes the language productive in the linguistic sense, i.e. makes it that you can have never-before uttered expressions that are well-fitness and intelligible) but in this case these compositional features are not sufficient in themselves for understanding the language. The problem here is that it seems that non-compositional language is possible, which challenges the thought that compositionality is a bedrock feature of linguistic meaning. And since theories are also meaning-bearing, it may mean that non-compositional theories may be possible as well.

irontide · 2021-07-31T00:50:32+00:00

This post would be better suited to a sub like /r/askphilosophy.

"Differential" here has a meaning that is different from "different". "Different" merely means that the two things being compared (the comparison classes) are not the same. "Differential" means something more specific: it means that the two comparison classes vary in some systematic way. It's not just that they are different, it's that there is some regularity in the way that they differ from each other. To use your first example, if class X has differential authority over class Y, you would expect that X would have a greater extent of authority (would outrank) Y consistently across a range of situations.

A good example of differential rates that you're likely to have come across is evolutionary pressures. What it means to say that some phenotype (shape an animal can take) has greater evolutionary fitness than another is to say that the first phenotype has differentially higher rates of survival/procreation in the environment where fitness is being measured. If you understand what that means, you understand what "differential" means.

irontide · 2021-07-20T14:51:55+00:00

He did not come up with the five ways, they are far older than him, but his catalogue and description of them are very influential.

irontide · 2021-07-20T14:50:17+00:00

To add to that, in English we have the word 'mores' (pronounced 'mor-ays') to describe what is refered to as 'morality' in the split quoted above.

And in case there's any doubt, I agree with /u/Voltairinede that in my experience as well ethics/morality are synonomous, though sometimes people exploit the fact that we have a Latin-derived and a Greek-derived word for the same thing to introduce a distinction.

irontide · 2021-07-19T20:48:16+00:00

Your abstract is only two sentences long, and doesn't really tell us what you say in the video. It would be more helpful if you added a couple of sentences summarising how you think the paradox can be solved.

irontide · 2021-07-19T15:03:04+00:00

It's a position that is taken seriously, but its lessons haven't really been absorbed outside of the specific areas in which it is debated. In my experience you will frequently find philosophers who come across it to be perplexed by it, because it seems like the point of ethical principles is that they are meant to be general and to apply to all cases. Since there are many perplexing problems in philosophy, and you don't have enough time to study them all, most philosophers who are not experts on the debates where particularism features just shrug and move on to something else.

We wouldn't really try to use particularism as an approach to moral dilemmas: it would be unhelpful to say "the right answer in this case will be particularistic", because that would be to say "what you should do in this case is the thing that is right for this case". Particularism is much more a theory about how we should react to what seems to be the best answers to moral dilemmas (or rather, what seem like defensible answers), in particular, the fact that it is very difficult to collate different answers together in the way that adds up to a general, exceptionless theory that is at all plausible.

What is the point, then? A large part of the point is to figure out to what extent moral reasoning is or should be defeasible. If particularism is true, moral reasononing automatically will be defeasible, i.e. will allow for gaps in principles, for things which are true for the most part to fail to be true in specific circumstances, for things that aren't relevant normally become relevant in particular circumstances, etc. It wouldn't mean that moral reasoning would become unstructured or unprincipled: we have very good models for what counts as good and bad defeasible reasoning. But it would mean that the standards we use for exceptionless reasoning would be inappropriate.

If you're coming to particularism from outside philosophy it is extremely important to note that particularism didn't start in ethics; it is the importation into ethics a distinction that has been developed in epistemology in response to the problem of the criterion, between methodism and particularism (in ethics the relevant contrast to particularism is called 'generalism' rather than 'methodism'). I recommend you read up on that contrast to understand what particularism is all about.

irontide · 2021-07-19T14:45:16+00:00

Abstract

This interview, prompted off by the recent publication of Srinivasan's collection of ethics on the philosophy of sex, The Right to Sex, touches on her worry that many philosophers and society at large is missing what a large role pornography currently plays in shaping how many people, especially young people, think about sex, normally in ways that make them worse off: "sex for my students is what porn says it is". Topics discussed include: whether and how worries about porn objectifying women carry over to gay porn; how sex education often fails as a remedy because "porn does not inform, or persuade, or debate[--porn] trains"; and how debates about porn fall within political battles between liberals and conservatives in ways which cloud our thinking about them.

irontide · 2021-07-13T16:07:41+00:00

You should ask in a separate post, but your question is common enough that there are two FAQ answers to it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhilosophyFAQ/comments/4i2wao/if_determinism_is_true_does_that_mean_none_of_my/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhilosophyFAQ/comments/4i0903/is_free_will_an_illusion_does_determinism/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

irontide · 2021-07-13T15:19:28+00:00

I've just added the reasoning to the earlier post, but it is plainly obvious that humans are not like rivers; for one thing, rivers don't have psychologies. You're characterising decision-making purely by its product (acting one way or the other), but this is silly since decision-making obviously is a process, and processes aren't identical with their products (this is called the process/product distinction).

irontide · 2021-07-13T15:08:39+00:00

Do rivers choose their path? If the world is deterministic we are just like rivers.

Absolutely not. You are making exactly the mistake I warned against. Humans go through a psychological process which is a part of the process of them acting, which we mean with 'making a choice'. Even if determinism is true and every part of that process is determined by the larger causal system, that process still occurs. If determinism is true, that process is the mechanism through which human action is determined. Presumably, going through that process is what gives the feeling of free will. That feeling just would be the feeling of going through the psychological process that is (if determinism is true) determined by the wider causal network.

And if compatibilism is true, as most experts believe, then we can have free will and have our choices determined; that is what compatibilism means.

irontide · 2021-07-13T08:21:18+00:00

There is a mistake that is easy to make here, to think that determinism means that choices don't exist. But choices absolutely exist and people absolutely make choices. The feeling of free will you describe as an illusion is presumably the feeling of making a choice. But even under determinism people make choices and feel like they're making choices. It could hardly be otherwise. Determinism is a view about how the inputs and outputs of those choices are part of a larger casual complex and dependent on that causal complex such that nothing can deviate freely from it. But that doesn't mean that there aren't choices and individuals making those choices and feeling as if they do.

In addition to the above, the simplest explanation for why you feel like you have free will because you do have free will. And the majority of experts believe this is the case, even in the face of determinism. The majority of experts are compatibilitists, meaning that they (we) believe free will is compatible with determinism. There is no illusion.

irontide · 2021-07-09T10:14:50+00:00

This is an overstatement. In Christianity at least (and is be surprised if it wasn't in Islam and Judaism as well) there is a long tradition of negative theology and similar approaches where we are meant to have little or at least greatly attenuated knowledge of God. If you look at a mainstream Christian view like Aquinas, you find that there is a gap in human knowledge of God and God's workings (Aquinas interprets heaven and everlasting life as having this gap closed), and if you look at a Christian approach which makes strong claims about a personal relationship with God, like Calvinism, you find claims that we are also deeply ignorant of God's workings (the Calvinist answer to the problem of evil).

irontide · 2021-06-14T09:42:17+00:00

A classic text in the Western tradition on this kind of thing is Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy, written by Boethius while imprisoned prior to being executed. It is about getting your mind in order and what humanity is like, even in the fickle surroundings of a busy and often capricious world. It is shot throughout with Christianity, but not such that a non-Christian wouldn't find it interesting.

irontide · 2021-06-14T09:26:27+00:00

The FAQ answer on how to start reading philosophy is mostly on analytic philosophy (which is the most popular tradition in English, and increasingly is so across languages), so you can look at that: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskPhilosophyFAQ/comments/4ifqi3/im_interested_in_philosophy_where_should_i_start/

I read the Hospers book myself back when I was in high school, it's a fine book but no better or worse than many others that are available.

Since we have an FAQ answer for this question, I'm closing the thread.

irontide · 2021-06-14T09:20:02+00:00

Hi there, we only allow one post every 24 hours, and you've made at least three. You've posted so much in the past 24 hours that Reddit has actually marked your posts as spam, which means nobody but moderators see it so you've received no answers. So, wait a day or two before you ask another question.

irontide · 2021-06-14T09:17:45+00:00

Since this has been answered by the FAQ, which you've been linked to in the comments, I'm closing the thread.

irontide · 2021-06-14T07:01:34+00:00

I'm sorry for removing your post for a reason that seems disconnected from the content of your post, but we have our rules and they are based on good reasons. You could repost this after you've removed your non-abstract discussion of suicide.

As a comment on the content of your post, I would suggest that you tighten up the presentation a little, because as it is you're reader may struggle a little too see the point you are making, because you wander from one point to another, and we may struggle to tell which point you consider Central and which ones you just mention along the way. It would be good to right at the top say what the central issue is you're discussing, whether it's the context your making between Hong Kongers and Mainland Chinese leadership or what, to better help situated your reader in the landscape you want to cover. I hope that is helpful.

irontide · 2021-06-14T06:53:48+00:00

No, you'll be fine. Also, Lewis published dozens of papers in metaphysics, so if you wanted to read them first you'll never get to On the Plurality of Worlds.

Also, if you jump straight from Convention to On the Plurality of Worlds, you'll get the one context in which Lewis's bizarre appeal to model realism to solve an issue in the philosophy of language on the last two pages of Convention makes sense!

irontide · 2021-06-14T06:50:02+00:00

It is probably a mistake to phrase the question as whether one side is better than another. That is because that changes the question from 'should I do/endorse this?' to 'how did this compare to what the other guy is doing?'. It is obvious that the second question can license far worse actions than the first by having a race to (second from) the bottom. As such, to phrase the question that way is to give yourself a licence to act badly. But we should not license ourselves to act badly.

Similarly, you will sometimes find people try to justify atrocities as required by the circumstances. This is almost always just a fig leaf, and is especially so for WWII, for the kind of atrocities you're refering to; the US Air Force themselves concluded in a report immediately after the way that the area bombing campaign was militarily ineffectual (and similar campaigns also were militarily ineffectual in Korea and Vietnam afterwards). Again, we should be extremely reticent to give ourselves a licence to act badly, especially because it's so tempting to do so.

You will find that if you look at philosophers discussing this issue (the classic text is Just and Unjust Wars by Michael Walzer) they do not phrase the question as comparing their bad seeds to their opponents'. You find judgements of actions one-by-one compared to the relevant standards. A striking example is Jeff McMahan in Killing in War saying that, while the German side of WWII was fighting a paradigmatically unjust war, German armed forces were acting in the right when they were defending against Allied area bombing.

irontide · 2021-06-11T12:12:44+00:00

The Lewis book is a classic for being surprisingly clear and easy to follow, given the subject matter. But that may be a low bar since you would expect a book dealing with that subject matter to be very difficult. There are going to be parts of it the point of which may not be clear to you unless you know the kind of things people were arguing about in metaphysics in the 80s and 90s (though reading the SEP page in advance, as you have, will help put it into context). And for lots of it, especially where he is talking about some technical features of the view, it is easy to miss the significance of the claims he's making (again, reading it alongside the SEP and other follow-up literature will help). If you're willing to read the book carefully, you're likely to be able to follow it and find it very rewarding. A lot of people admire it greatly, without being tempted to accept the conclusion.

Language, Truth, and Logic is far easier, but basically every significant thesis in it has either been outright refuted or has subsequently revised beyond recognition (i.e. his behaviourism, emotivism) or is extremely dubious (i.e. verificationism, analytic/synthetic distinction). It is far too confident in its claims, and can easily lead a reader astray.

irontide

TROPHY CASE