86th Philosopher’s Carnival

Posted on February 16, 2009
Filed Under Philosophy | 3 Comments

An other Philosopher’s Carnival. I was just going to put this on the sidebar but there were a few I wanted to comment on. So let me list my favorites.

I really liked the debate about distinguishing reasoning from logic. To me one big problem in the debate is in keeping the terms straight. That is what do we mean by reason and what do we mean by logic? Often a lot of the debate consists of folks talking past one an other because they don’t understand the terms of the question the same way.

To me logic ends up just being extended to semiotics. At a minimum one has to keep distinguished deductive logic, inductive logic, and abduction logic. Reasoning is just the application of these three. However given the nature of induction and abduction reasoning can lead to problematic processes simply because our emotions and moods can affect the kind of reasoning the last two logics have. I’d even say in practice they can with deductive logic too. While deductive logic is in theory absolute in practice we can make mistakes as we step through our reasoning. Which is why we don’t all score perfectly on our mathematics or physics homework.

What tends to happen in my experience though is that folks tend to assume reasoning is deductive — even when they think they aren’t — and say that reasoning can’t lead to inconsistencies.

Anyway the post up for the carnival ends up being tied to the coherency issue of reasoning. That is when do incoherent results make something unreasonable? I tend to think that a more difficult question than it initially appears. While I think coherency is a nice test for truth I’m not sure incoherency is a test for falsity. Rather it depends upon the nature of the inconsistency. Consider QM & GR which are incoherent but which most physicists think are basically correct in their own realms. Rather than being seen as false they are seen as incomplete and that there is some more fundamental theory that will unify the two and have no incoherency. Put simply I think we ought be careful not to conflate “false” with “incomplete.”

The next post (which I’ll comment on later) is an argument from consciousness of tiem to presentism. I’ll just say that if instead of thinking in terms of fully present phenomenal moments (quale as normally conceived) into thinking of moments of process ones reasoning changes a great deal.

A post I really liked was from Enigmania on when philosophers should listen to scientists and mathematicians. As regular readers know I’m pretty skeptical about intuitions and think philosophy should follow science as closely as possible and merely point out the range of issues compatible with the empirical science.

The problem is that science is always much more vague than some think (especially philosophically naive scientists). So there’s a lot more that can be said here than most assume. (I’ve even discovered myself asserting something as more determined than it is)

Anyway, the post is about people assuming that physics is reasonably open ontologically but forgetting that mathematics is as well. Put an other way folks are willing to be careful about the physics and then forget about all the issues in foundations of mathematics.

An other good post in this carnival was on modal logic and God’s foreknowledge. (A topic we’ve discussed here a lot) I think it raises a good point about foreknowledge I’ve made before. That is just because someone knows a truth about the future it isn’t a necessary truth. There is some possible world in which it isn’t true. I’m not sure that in LDS debates it ends up being that relevant though since the concern is just whether some aspect about the future is fixed once someone knows it. That is LDS typically aren’t concerned about what is metaphysically necessary. (Perhaps due to the way we conceive of the infinite past)

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Comments

3 Responses to “86th Philosopher’s Carnival”

Clark, under an extremely broad set of assumptions, it is hard to see how any particular truth about a future event could be a metaphysically necessary truth.

So unless one takes the unusual position that all facts are metaphysically necessary (due to e.g. asserting the joint consequence of determinism and a denial of initial conditions), I don’t see why anyone should consider remarkable the relatively obvious proposition that historical facts past, present and future are contingent rather than necessary.

Clark and Mark: Clark is right, the argument given is entirely irrelevant to the foreknowledge issue since the issue isn’t whether what is known is necessary (it isn’t). If God knows that Clark is married, it doesn’t follow that he is necessarily married. However, it does follow that if at t1 God infallibly knows that Clark is married at t2, then Clark is married at t2 and no one could change that fact without changing the past facts about what God knew at t1 infallibly.

However, if there is a truth at t1 about what will happen at t2, then it may be that what makes it true at t1 that there is a truth about t2 would render the truth about t2 unchangeable. We have to know what the truth-maker is.

Blake, I think it becomes more important to those who see God as a necessary being. If God is a necessary being then I think a case could be made his foreknowledge is necessary. (I’m not sure admittedly – I’ve not thought through that issue) Since few Mormons consider God a necessary being in the sense one finds in orthodox Christian theology, what you say definitely follows. While not relevant I do find some adopting theological arguments picked up from Evangelicals.

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