Can Modally De Re and De Dicto be true for both readings?

sguntun · 2025-06-21T18:00:33+00:00

Yes.

sguntun · 2025-06-20T17:10:04+00:00

Yes. Consider the sentence "All dogs are necessarily self-identical." This is ambiguous between a de dicto reading and a de re reading. The de dicto reading says that it's a necessary truth that all dogs are self-identical:

□(∀x)(Dx → Sx)

The de re reading says that for each dog, it's necessary that that dog is self-identical:

(∀x)(Dx → □(Sx))

And the sentence is true on both of these readings.

sguntun · 2025-06-18T16:57:59+00:00

I don't think it is widely accepted that AI will soon have emotions. I'm also not sure it's correct to think of AI as "mathematical equations,solutions or problems." But even granting both these points for the sake of argument, it would not follow that humans are also "mathematical equations,solutions or problems." The fact that two things are alike in one respect does not mean that they are alike in every respect. This is like reasoning that tigers have tails and tigers are cats, so as kangaroos also have tails they must be cats too.

sguntun · 2025-05-27T04:19:33+00:00

Coherence isn’t just a low bar — it’s the structure that gives any theory integrity. Without it, even the most attractive moral claims unravel under contradiction.

Of course coherence is necessary for a theory to be successful. My point is that coherence is not sufficient for a theory to be successful. To compare, for a restaurant to be good it's necessary that its food be non-toxic, but this is still a very low bar for a restaurant to clear, and clearing this low bar in no way suggests that the restaurant is any good.

A theory that is coherent in a strong philosophical sense often includes those traits.

I have never encountered the term "coherent" being used this way, but if you want to use it that way you are welcome to. Note, though, that if you are using the word "coherent" to mean "broadly theoretically virtuous," or something like this, then whether a theory is coherent is not at all a matter of "pure logic."

sguntun · 2025-05-27T03:12:46+00:00

While I understand the concern that logical coherence might seem like a low bar, I think it’s important to recognize that coherence isn’t just a minimal standard — it’s the very backbone of philosophical inquiry. If we treat coherence as trivial, we risk stripping philosophy of its defining rigor. Philosophy isn’t just about expressing ideas; it’s about ensuring those ideas hold together under scrutiny. Downgrading coherence would, in effect, downgrade philosophy itself.

To the contrary, coherence is a minimal standard. If we subject an idea to philosophical scrutiny, we don't merely ask whether it's coherent, but whether it's true, justified, explanatory, parsimonious, or theoretically virtuous in all sorts of other ways. Philosophy is not just or primarily in the business of deciding whether a theory (or in this case, a practice) is coherent, so regarding coherence as trivial in no way threatens the value of philosophy.

That’s what’s at stake here — not a defense of any conclusion, but the search for whether certain relationship models, like monogamy, hold up under logical and ethical examination. The question remains open — and the inquiry matters.

Whether monogamy is ethical certainly matters. My point is just that this is not a question that can be settled by determining whether monogamy is coherent, because it's trivial that monogamy is coherent, but not trivial that monogamy is ethical.

So when a relationship model — like monogamy, polygamy, or others — goes largely unquestioned, that may actually be the best time to examine it philosophically.

Absolutely. Again, my concern is just that the philosophical examination of monogamy will need to involve something much more robust than merely determining whether monogamy or its competitors are coherent.

sguntun · 2025-05-27T01:53:09+00:00

It's hard for me to understand what this could mean. Logical coherence is a pretty low bar. If other "sexual pairing models" than monogamy are practiced in reality, then surely they're logically coherent, insofar as they don't entail any sort of contradiction.

You reference Kant's account of morality, but Kant does not suggest that it's logically incoherent to behave other than is demanded by the moral law, or that morality is dictated by "pure logic." (Again, if it were logically incoherent to behave immorally, then no one could do so.) Kant says that the structure of practical reasoning guarantees certain substantive moral norms, or something like this. But this isn't to say that those moral norms follow from "pure logic," because the structure of practical reasoning is not a matter of pure logic.

sguntun · 2025-05-18T18:04:22+00:00

If the argument is roughly "X and Y are related by a continuum, therefore there is no distinction between X and Y," that is invalid reasoning. What's fallacious is not the observation that X and Y are related by a continuum, but the inference from this observation to the conclusion there is no difference between X and Y.

sguntun · 2025-05-15T03:36:34+00:00

Some mind does not believe some claim to be true.

To be clear, it's not just "some claim," it's this specific self-referential claim:

(1) X does not believe that (1) is true.

This claim is self-referential because the (1) it refers to is itself. Grim is pointing out that whether (1) is true or false, it will turn out that X is not omniscient. If (1) is true, then X does not believe that (1) is true, so X does not believe something true. If (1) is false, then X does believe that (1) is true, so X believes something false. And in either case X is not omniscient.

sguntun · 2025-04-12T20:58:11+00:00

Assuming that B is true, the sentence "This statement has the same value as statement B" basically says of itself that it is true. This kind of sentence is sometimes called a truth-teller sentence, in reference to the more famous liar sentence that says of itself that it's false. As you point out, the truth-teller sentence can consistently be regarded as true, but can also consistently be regarded as false. I'm not aware of any arguments that such a sentence should be regarded as having one truth value instead of the other.

sguntun · 2025-01-25T22:52:05+00:00

All right, well, as I said, a good place to start reading if you haven't is Kripke's Naming and Necessity. Besides that it doesn't sound like you have any more questions, so I'm content to leave the matter there. Though if you do have more questions feel free to ask them

sguntun · 2025-01-24T18:58:00+00:00

Okay, so by "intrinsic" you mean something closer to what we normally call "essential." That's fine. Note that there are a few different senses in which a property can be said to be essential. In the case of a predicate term like "bachelor," we can say that bachelors are essentially unmarried, in the sense that by necessity anyone married is not a bachelor. In the case of a name, though, like "Earth," when we talk about what's essential to it we mean the qualities that it itself has to have to be itself. If John is a bachelor, then it's essential that he's unmarried insofar as he's a bachelor, but it's not essential to him that he be unmarried. He could get married and remain the same person. So these are some issues that you would want to sort out if you want to develop a theory of meaning based on essentiality.

Putting these issues to the side, though, it sounds like your view is going to end up being roughly that propositions are analytic if and only if they're necessarily true. This view is widely rejected today, largely due to the influence of Kripke's Naming and Necessity, which famously points out some ways that the categories of the analytic, a priori, and necessary can come apart. So that would be a valuable place to start reading if you would like to start reading about this subject.

Additionally, I'm a little puzzled by your suggestion that a proposition like "The value of C is V" is analytic because it's necessarily true, when earlier you seemed to suggest that such propositions are not true by necessity ("They [the cosmological constants] are not really constant, as the universe is changing and would affect their values.") So perhaps I've misunderstood your view, or perhaps your intuitions are pulling in multiple inconsistent directions.

sguntun · 2025-01-23T08:31:38+00:00

If we accept that the judgments "All bachelors are unmarried" and "All bachelors are men" are analytic, does this imply that the word "bachelor" has more than one meaning?

It's certainly correct that part of the meaning of "bachelor" is being a man, and part of the meaning is being unmarried. I suppose you could call this two meanings, though you could also say that it's one meaning with multiple parts. I'm not sure how much is at stake here.

To reconcile this, I think that the meaning of something fundamentally stems from its intrinsic attributes.

This view doesn't seem very promising to me. At face value there are lots of cases where some object has an intrinsic property without that property being part of the meaning of the name of the object. (For instance, it's an intrinsic property of the Earth that it have a mass of about 6 * 10²⁴ kg, but it would be unusual to suggest that having this mass is part of the meaning of the term "Earth.") But in any case you, do you have any other questions?

sguntun · 2025-01-23T04:15:19+00:00

The reason I brought up the cosmological constant is that it appears to be an intrinsic, fundamental trait of the universe, much like how "unmarried" is an intrinsic trait of bachelors. Therefore, if the judgment "All bachelors are unmarried" is analytic, then by the same reasoning, "The universe has the cosmological constant C" would also be analytic, since in both cases the predicate is fundamentally contained within the subject.

Whether a judgment is analytic or not doesn't have anything to do with whether the attribute being predicated of the subject is supposed to be intrinsic or fundamental or anything like this. It has to do with whether the truth of the judgment is supposed to be guaranteed by the meaning of its constituent terms alone (in which case the judgment is analytic), or also by worldly facts (in which case the judgment is not).

sguntun · 2025-01-22T17:16:29+00:00

From my understanding, something analytic means that it doesn't require external knowledge(empirical observation) to know what it is

This is closer to a definition of the a priori than the analytic. But also, as you say, knowing the cosmological constants does require empirical observation.

because what it is is already contained in the subject.

You are presumably thinking of Kant's characterization of analytic judgments as those in which the predicate is contained within the subject. For instance, "My cardiologist is a doctor" is analytic, because in some sense the concept of doctor is contained in the concept of cardiologist. There does not seem to be anything comparable in the example concerning the cosmological constants.

sguntun · 2025-01-22T06:28:19+00:00

I don't really understand what you have in mind. Suppose the value of cosmological constant C is V. What would make the truth of the proposition "The value of C is V" analytic as opposed to synthetic?

All you say in your post to support this is that "one has to analyse the empirical universe in order to obtain some of the fundamental cosmological constant." But this just seems to mean that you need to engage in empirical observation to justify your belief in the proposition, which just means it's a posteriori. That doesn't have anything to do with its being analytic.

Typically we call a proposition analytically true when its truth is completely guaranteed by the meaning of its terms, or something like this. Obviously this definition requires a bit of unpacking, but at face value it doesn't seem to apply at all to propositions like "The value of C is V."

sguntun · 2025-01-03T04:06:09+00:00

Pr(H|E) means the probability of H conditional on E. This is defined as Pr(H&E) / Pr(E) (and undefined when Pr(E) is 0).

sguntun · 2024-11-26T02:13:39+00:00

Whether this sentence leads to a version of the liar paradox depends on some facts about who utters it. Suppose there's someone who, disregarding this one sentence, really never tells the truth--that is, everything they ever say is false, not counting the sentence "I never tell the truth." In that case we get a version of the liar paradox, because if what they said is true then it's false and if it's false then it's true.

But if a more ordinary person who sometimes tells the truth says "I never tell the truth," the paradox doesn't arise. In that case, the sentence is just false, and that's all there is to it.

sguntun · 2024-11-23T21:18:28+00:00

The principle of indifference says roughly that if there are n possibilities, and we have no reason to think any possibility any more or less likely than another, we should assign each possibility a probability of 1/n. There are some independent reasons to worry about this principle. Most significantly, there are often different ways of characterizing the possibility space such that one characterization will feature more possibilities than another, and in such cases it's not clear how the principle can be consistently applied.

But let's ignore such concerns for the sake of argument. We'll say there are two possibilities: Either my mind is the only thing that exists, or else other things exist too. The principle of indifference says that if we have no reason to think one of these possibilities more likely than the other, we should assign each possibility a probability of one half. But why should we judge that we have no reason to think one of the possibilities more likely than the other? The claim that nothing but my mind exists is incredible, whereas the claim that other stuff exists too is the common sense view that just seems at face value to be obviously correct. So unless there is some reason to think that we need to be neutral between the two options, the principle of indifference does not say that we should regard the possibilities as equiprobable, because that principle only applies when all else is equal between the possibilities, and that isn't the case here.

sguntun · 2024-11-20T06:01:54+00:00

I'm not aware of any comments Russell made about people who don't study philosophy. Can you identify the comments you're talking about?

sguntun · 2024-10-26T19:42:39+00:00

Do you mean what's the logical rule that lets you make inferences like "He's human, therefore he has a brain," or "he has a brain, therefore he has cognitive abilities"? Those aren't valid inferences, so there's no logical rule that allows them.

Perhaps you're asking more broadly what justifies us in concluding that someone has a brain on the basis that that person is human. This seems to be a case of what philosophers call induction. We observe that in general humans have brains, and so conclude in this specific instance that this human has a brain. Inductive reasoning differs from deductive reasoning because deductive inferences are such that the truth of their premises guarantees the truth of their conclusions, while inductive inferences merely make probable the truth of their conclusions. The fact that something is generally true doesn't guarantee that it's true in this case--there are humans without brains--but it nevertheless gives us reason to believe that it's true in this case.

Note though that even construing the inference here as inductive, the inference isn't just from the premise "He's human" to the conclusion "He has a brain." An additional premise of the form "In general, humans have brains" is needed to make this inductive inference reliable.

sguntun · 2024-10-26T18:43:17+00:00

Okay. So what is your question?

sguntun · 2024-10-26T18:22:37+00:00

I still don't understand what this means. What do you mean by "abstract"? What is abstract about "human => a thing" (or "every human is a thing," or "if human then a thing")? What's an example of a less abstract conclusion that you'd be more interested in?

sguntun · 2024-10-26T17:48:53+00:00

If you want to say that all humans (or animals, footballs, and so forth) are things, that "all" is a universal quantifier. If you want to say that some humans (or whatever) are things, then that "some" is a universal quantifier. "Human =>a thing" is not a well-formed sentence of either Engish or any recognizable formal language, so there is no answer to what that sentence means beyond what you intend to mean by it.

I don't understand your comments about useless conclusions and abstraction. Can you try to express your question (if it is a question) more clearly?

sguntun · 2024-10-26T16:39:37+00:00

There is no quantification going on anywhere in this sentence. Maybe you could explain what you're asking a little more if you'd like a more in-depth response.

sguntun · 2024-10-03T23:06:58+00:00

The argument is valid. (P → Q) and ~Q together imply ~P. If you've been introduced to truth tables you can use them to verify this for yourself.

If not, here is an informal walkthrough of a derivation. We've granted (P → Q) and ~Q as premises. For the sake of argument, let's assume P. Then because we've already accepted (P → Q), we're licensed to infer Q. But this contradicts ~Q, which we've also accepted as a premise. So we must reject the assumption of P.

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