To formulate a statement that reduces a universal domain that includes myself and my thoughts or statements, to one or more factors that affect truth-value domain-wide, I must nevertheless transcend that universal domain so that I can make that factor-exempt statement itself, as well as any factor-exempt arguments that I might want to offer for that statement.
Otherwise, precisely because everything including the reduction itself is by that reduction’s own assertion subject to the effects of those truth-limiting or truth-changing factors, that reduction cannot be true merely in and of itself as a statement within the predicated domain that nevertheless makes a general statement about it.
Tags: Bad Reasoning15 Comments
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
I think it was a mistake to add the new contributors to this blog. The quality of the posts has gone down dramatically. Please go back to just Matt and Madeline.
Ideally, I’d like to see under each comment and each post:
Hide this comment (or post)
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There could also be unhide links as well.
Problem solved. Who wants pie or a memory upgrade.
gotta agree with anon.
Not sure what the purpose of this post is.
The problem with that Machine is that I do not know how to do that. I cannot find a plugin that does it and you have to be careful what plugins you add – if they break then so does your whole blog.
I’m happy to look into it but I have no idea where to start as a cursory search of the plugins is not bringing anything up.
Hi Machine,
Sorry. I wasn’t trying to be a jerk. I just thought it might be useful for me to report my opinion for what its worth (which probably isn’t much).
The feature is on facebook, and is common in chat rooms, although ignoring a troll in chat is almost always per-session only. And facebook is too busy dragging their knuckles to notice that the feature should be a part of status and other comment threads. User customizability is not very high on Facebook, WordPress or just about any other similar organizations.
And anyone who doesn’t understand the purpose of the post should by all means live by self-referentially inconsistent and self-contradictory assertions.
The blog broke again last night, 3rd time this week, 5th time in the last fortnight. Geoff, our host, says it is plugin related so I am reluctant to install anything additional unless it is crucial and has been thoroughly tested. I am trying to run as few as possible.
Perhaps the intense debate plugin for comments would do what you suggest but I have been on sites with it and find it ugly and you have to log in to leave a comment and it is a pain to navigate and it takes too long to load – which is a big no no as both Alexa and search engines will penalise pages that take too long to load.
I think people are just going to have to skip what they do not enjoy. Matt and I get feedback from people saying “can you publish more lay friendly stuff” “you have too much lay material, can you put up some more advanced content” – we have high school students through to heads of philosophy departments reading this blog so we try to mix it up so that the front page has a range of material on it at different levels – lay friendly through to technical.
If the lead post on the home page is not your thing and you’ve read all the others on the front page then click on some tags, go to the archive page and navigate by category, search for something. There is 4 years worth of material here and there are no time limits on commenting – the recent comments widget will pick up your comment, others will see it and follow and before you know it a new conversation on and old post is going.
Anon, Machine’s point is that if one asserts a criteria about a class of propositions then one needs to be careful that that assertion itself does not fall into that class. If it does then the criteria applies to itself. Not taking care to not do this puts one’s position at risk of being self-contradictory.
For example, take the simplistic statement some popular atheists commonly assert: “any one who makes a positive claim must prove it”. This statement is itself a positive claim, hence the atheist must prove it, not just assert it.
Or take the assertion: “it is wrong to tell others what to do”. This takes a class of actions, the class of ‘telling others what to do,’ and says that all actions in that class have the property of being wrong. The problem is that the assertion “it is wrong to tell others what to do”, itself is a statement which tells others they should not do something, and hence, it falls into the very class of actions it condemns.
Examples can be multiplied but I hope you get the idea.
Just remember this five-word question:
“What about that statement itself?”
Dismissals of the point are often indistinguishable from simply not wanting the question to be asked. Bait with a universal quantifier of the expressed or implied subject term (which therefore includes the statement being made), and then switch if anyone catches on to the implications for that statement itself.
Machine learning that question made me step up about 5 levels in terms of my ability to debate and argue – it is funny how people will stare at you in amazement when you quickly dispatch an argument completely unaware that all you did was turn the argument back on itself. You try to explain it, they think you are being complex and what you are talking about is too hard to learn but it is as simple as you just put it.
Matt, that’s right. It can be expressed in terms of classes, sets, domains, meanings, etc.
“It is true that there is no truth, and it is absolutely the case that everything is relative.” 😀
[…] post is a reflection on the Once Upon an A Priori…. post over at theMandM […]
The whole point for the common person exposed to general universal statements about knowledge, truth, or reality, such as “Everything is X” (where X means determined, person-relative, illusion, maya, false, subjective, biased, hopeless, meaningless, futile, bs, or limited by language, desires, etc.), is to ask about the status of those statements in view of what they assert about themselves.
I personally know a number of quite nonintellectual people who have had life-changing eureka moments from becoming aware of this intellectual sight-of-hand and asking that simple question I mentioned earlier.
Madeleine, I’m looking around for a plugin with those features.
Being accurate to all concerns is what drives the emphasis on precision in philosophical and theological thinking, and self-reference is in a sense just as crucial as the most basic criteria.
But there is a salvation principle in the use of reason and logic. The salvation of God as a general notion of the ultimate mind and what God’s principles of being imply for a finite knower include an operational saving principle in that same valuing and implementing of reason and against entropy and the probably entropy-driven tendency toward self-contradiction. Add universal causality and you have the potential for a series of willful finitely-unrectifiable defections from the ideal of rational and logical thought and action. Sort of a sin cocktail that’s subtlely yet radically bad for you, but which we drink periodically nonetheless.
So the constant use of reason as necessary for life is already a partial taking advantage of the salvation of God in terms of some kind of general common grace granted by virtue of existing in God’s substantially rational and logical world, by instantiating and referencing transcendental principles that are nothing other than necessary instrumental aspects of the divine mind. And the fact that we don’t perfectly actualize the ideal also requires that we operate on the basis of reason in order to realize and recognize willful defections from that same reason and logic. The universal applicability of reason is a power of a nonlocal transcendent mind whose principles of thinking are necessarily instantiated in any finite being. A perfect instantiation is all-powerful, which makes possible and guarantees the salvation offered through Jesus Christ, which is paralleled already in cognitive and evaluative processes which also must be believed in to survive and thrive in the immediate experiential world.
If Jesus saves, it’s only because a saving method of thought paved the way through principles that must be used to give meaning to the action taken. Only God, since one core aspect of God’s being simply *is* the set of logical and rational principles, can perfectly rectify the effects of deliberate irrational acts and thoughts in a context of universal causality, and transform the whole person, eventually comprehensively.