That's not really a critique of my idea at all. Free will requires unpredictability, but not all unpredictability is free will. Driving a car requires motion but not all motion is driving a car. Get it?
Here are a couple of relevant lines from my paper:

"This paper will not claim indeterminism as a source of free will."

"There are views in which determinism and predictability are both said to be eliminated in the context of human choice by quantum indeterminacy. But critics of these views point out that if the relevant cause of an action is an indeterminate quantum event, then the human agent can not determine what he does, and thus can not be the source of his own actions. I agree with the critics on this point. In contrast to quantum indeterminacy, undecidable dynamics are deterministic, and are a property of the human system taken as a whole, not a property of some little part of a human."

Your premise relies on the idea that unpredictability in behavior proves free will however the philosophical idea of indeterminism states that the random fluctuations of quantum mechanics can mean no free will while also being unpredictable.

Morality doesn't follow from first-order premises (truth claims about the universe,) and so it's in even worse shape than "reality" is when challenged by Descartes. It relies upon either a middle or supplemental step to get to where it wants to go. That middle or supplemental step can be rejected by anyone trivially.

Push yourself to ask hard questions. What if ruthlessly enslaving 90% of the human race is the only way to ensure that humanity doesn't spoil its only life support system and doom itself to civilizational collapse and accelerated extinction? Personally, when I consider such hypotheticals, I become uncomfortable with even the vague notion that there is an objectively correct moral answer to them, regardless of whether I think I know what it is.

If you don't, by all means. Recognize that various moral systems posited throughout history would offer up both conflicting rationales and even conflicting answers outright, and then claim with confidence that surely there is an objectively correct answer, even if perhaps you don't know it.

At what timestamp does he mention Brandom? I don't remember Brandom coming up in the video (though given the context I did almost hear 'Brandom' when he talked about 'rebranding' the redundancy theory of truth as the deflationary theory). Brandom's anaphoric/prosentential theory of truth is definitely a version of deflationism but I don't know if Blackburn specifically had Brandom in mind when he mentioned deflationism at the end (again, unless I missed that moment or there's a longer version of this video?).

In any case, I don't think your worry applies to Brandom's account of truth. Yes, he does take the content of our thoughts and utterances to depend on how those discursive acts make explicit norms within larger social practices. However, those are specifically practices of giving and asking for reasons (his "deontic scorekeeping") and the structure of that scorekeeping in the cases of science, morality, and a host of everyday topics - e.g. what food is in the fridge, to take Blackburn's example - is specifically one of representing objects (his "de re ascriptions of propositional attitudes"). Those two features alone easily makes room for a minority of moral activists in a community to be right and even for an entire community to be wrong, since by making claims that answer not just to one another (in a community) but to objects they specifically point to limitations in individual perspectives on the truth and even to all of the perspectives the community has so far.

None of this would look like "tapping into something" in a sense that looks like a direct intuition of the moral good but it would involve responding to the objective moral features of the world, just in a way that involves a fundamentally perspectival access to those objective truths and a need to arrive at that truth by learning from the perspectives of others (including perspectives that no one in one's community has yet reached).

It's true in the context of our idea about what we call the physical world, but really there's no way for you to find out the truth or reality of anything. Only through the help of knowledge passed down generation to generation do you experience anything.

So technically that statement is true, but actually it depends on what you mean by "sun", "ice cube", "close enough", and "melt".

One could argue the sun itself doesn't do anything to the ice cube. Do you define the sun as an entity that has heat separate from itself and applies it to the ice cube? Or is the sun itself heat? Etc....

What do you mean by ice cube? An ice cube 1000x the size of the sun will probably not melt.

What do you mean by close enough? An ice cube left out in the sun can melt on earth, but also the earth has huge ice caps that haven't melted. Etc

I think you get the point. For all intents and purposes that we would use, yes it is true. But it ain't necessarily so, or not objectively true without specific context. I think it was George Box that said "all models are wrong, but some are useful."

But at the same time the statement is false because an ice cube will likely sublimate in the vacuum of space before it came close enough to melt.

[removed]

Just adopt a pragmatic account of truth like Rorty proposed decades ago. The truth is simply what works, it is the end point of democratic discussion and consensus.

They did the same thing to me.

Update it appears the philosophy mod reported me to reddit mods for report abuse. Good hopefully they'll notice the actual mod abuse going on.

But it's not just courage for the sake of courage. There is always a motivating ethic of some kind, or a desire for change.

>I'd you think that natural selection acts on the level of genes (selfish gene theory).

Yes but just about any human action can be argued to have evolutionary benefit, so we can't use this as a feature or a marker of ethical progress.

What is your objection to the correspondence theory?

Because even if you determine that the temperature of X is Y, you still can't prove that X exists beyond your mind.

If you accept that the object is there, regardless of the availability of proof, you can get as far as proving the object has a temperature. But you will never be able to determine if the object is hot or cold, because hot and cold are always subjective to what you're measuring it against.

Salt can melt a snail, does that make it hot? Ice cream will melt if you do nothing, the world you live in is hot to the ice cream. I'm not ignoring your example, I'm trying to help you think differently. Your current method won't lead where you want it to go.

Yeah thump your book harder maybe you can silence everyone to agree with you. The ontological issue, “what is true” simply cannot be seperated from the verificational or the semantic issue, “how do we accept the truth of a proposition”. You strategy to establish this is simply book thumping, thumpf, I said so, no interpretation of an actual historical truths say in mathematics or sciences, nothing, just the claim that it might be the case that those 2 issues are independent. Which it maybe.

The worst part of this strategy when employed by “realist” philosophers is how disingenuous it is. There is very good reason why you are so sparse in your comments.

Suppose you decided to elucidate more on the notion of we and I which you use, the very next step would put you in realms of biology or cognitive science. Presumably our coming to know something etc are biological or sociological activities. When you do that then these questions become empirical scientific working hypothesis.

> It may simply be that there are things which I cannot know.

Precisely why we reject a correspondence view. If you do think it is plausible that there are truths we would never know, then why it is implausible for to hold that whatever statements one attaches the predicate is true() to, requires for it is very construction the same bounded/deficient/pre determined concepts/precepts.

Ipso facto reject the correspondence view.

In this video he sort of goes through this history of Truth-seeking and at the end of this video, landing on Robert Brandom who is a deflationist. Brandom reduces (my opinion) morality to the making-explicit-of a "discursive rationality", which (I believe he implies) originates from implicit... practices?

All of that seems fine to me (logical, pragmatic), except it seems to say that Moral Good (which we make explicit always later) is dependent upon the happenstance of a landscape of possible actions with respect to that discursivity.

To say it stupidly, if one imagines the actions of the present time as a bunch of lines on a hurricane spaghetti model, the actions we later define as "good" are those ones which happened not to strike land. In this way, Moral Good (I'm specifically talking about non-normative Moral Good, thus "cancelling out" the utility of actions) at present is chaotic. To me this is intuitively repugnant. I believe humans can intuit moral good. I believe humans can "tap into something" morally good, when the world around them is screaming otherwise, even placing them at great peril. I think deflationism leads to [Brandom and Blackburns] conclusion about morality [that it is, in the moment, chaotic].

> Everything Einstein said is true.

In many programming languages you can write:

while queue.hasValues():
    process(queue.first())

Beginners are often introduced to loops as grammaticallically requiring a comparison, because a comparison is less abstract to think about, then a truth-value. In school you only learn to do math to numbers. That's why they often write this:

while queue.hasValues() == True:
    process(queue.first())

In logical notation you can write one of those:

• Forall (reverse A) s in Einsteins-statements : s.
• Forall s in Einsteins-statements: s = T.
• Big-And (reverse V) Einsteins-statements.

Only the second phrasing has an analogue in natural language - "All Einsteins statements are true." It seems that unlike in mathematical or most(!) programming languages, this kind of sentence requires a comparison in English. "All <set> are <individual-comparator>".

There could be a natural language where you could indeed just say something like "All Einsteins statements." without "are true" and have it make grammatical sense. English just doesn't happen to be that language.

Actually, I have encountered "What he said." as an expression of agreement on Reddit.

>And I'm not saying that we can't have objective truths, they are all around us. I am saying hot and cold are not among them. Temperature is among them, but temperature is not hot or cold, it just is.

>If you want to follow this down a 10 year exploration, all you can prove as an objective truth at the moment is "I think therefore I am." Nothing beyond that.

Doesn't this first quote contradict the second? The temperature of an object is measurable and objective and is defined as the average kinetic energy of the molecules of the substance/material. That is not subjective or relative to the surrounding objects.

Why is this not provable to be objective in the 2nd quote but in the 1st "Temperature is among them" when referring to objective truths?

This reminds me of Russel's teapot. I'm not completely sure what the point of it is. Maybe: If you believe in god without any evidence (some believers do, some don't), then you might as well believe in a teapot in space.

A teapot in space isn't usefully true without evidence. You might as well say it's existance isn't true at all. This also sounds like "pragmatism" from the video.

I think it doesn't hurt to say that there could be a teapot in space. It would be wrong to say for certain that there is no approximately teapod shaped asteroid in the asteroid belt.

A god that doesn't interact with the world is certainly irrelevant. A god that only punishes or rewards people in the afterlife is still unknowable but also very relevant. I still agree insofar that you shouldn't worry about that possibility, given you have no evidence now.

So there are three levels: true or false, eventually knowable, relevant.

To my mind, the meaningful distinction is that I am capable of knowing that what I know to be true is not the extent of what may be possible to be true. It removes a limitation of absoluteness. It allows for the limitations of my own conceptual and intellectual abilities. It acknowledges and allows for the real limitation of confirmation bias to which all humans are subject, without closing the door behind what may be possible.

[removed]

Me too! Correspondence with what the statement is about.

The objection was why care about truth if we can’t get to it?

Now, I never said all truths are inaccessible, only that perhaps some are.

So the objection is: why care about truth if some truths may be inaccessible?

My response is: this doesn’t change whether or not the way some things are might be inaccessible to us, and so we want a term for the way things are which applies in the those cases too. I think the term for that is “truth”, but I’ll go with another if you really insist on using it differently.

Perhaps this was the objection intended. But I don’t understand it.

What sort of theory of a concept do you want, other than a definition?

[removed]