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You ask good and fair questions , I don't know why you let your confidence to be undermined by rhetorical questions. Yes, its just putting the label 'perfect' on reality where perfect doesn't mean anything other than just being a complete,exhaustive desription of reality. How does any of that interesting? Does God have the ability to create the world in a different way? If the answer is yes, then it means either that he has a preference to create the world this way (which means that all things considered - he has a preference for children getting raped on a daily basis) or he is indifferent to all of this and creating the world this way was completely arbitrary and he had no desire to create it in any other way. If the answer is no - then creating the world this way was due to certain limitations and those limitations is what largely explains the traits of this world - but in this case suddenly labels like "perfect" won't sound that cool, because the design of reality will be largely explained by those limitations, not by some design. ------------------------------------------ "oh , you don't get it, all the cool stuff and all the affordance that is possible in this world is due to the profound grand design" Yeah? What are we talking about there, are we talking about logical impossibility (like the world couldn't have been created in other ways with different laws of physics while also maintaining all the cool stuff and affordances that are in this world?) If the answer to that is "Yes" then whats the argument for that (whats the argument that establish the contradiction in creating such a world)? And this is where I probably won't get any response, but if there is no response there, then the question that people should ask next is this - why claim that the world is perfect if you can't defend it? Also just to flag some things - notice the value judgements - you are myopic and selfish for putting certain negative judgements on the design of this world , and on the other hand we also want to claim that the design is perfect (where the design includes facts like giving us agents certain preferences and values that goes against the grand design). If the grand design includes us being myopic , selfish and not being able to appreciate the design, then why is it exactly the case that we get blamed for that ? All of that is also part of the perfection, bro (if we want to be consistent and dont just want to play rhetorically around the label of perfect).

Makes sense. I think when it comes to these pragmatic (how to live peacefully together and how to solve disagreements ) questions - philosophers would be better off researching conflict resolution tools, than spending time trying to establish objective morality and normative realism. One reason is because (even if they were actually right and they would successfully pull that off) most of the population wouldn't be motivated by that (I think I would include myself there as well). The reason why I brought this up is because I see so many times this problem of conflict resolution brought up to people like us (who reject normative realism and objective morality) as if it would be unqiue to us and as if it would be suddenly resolved by affirming realism.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Even when we lay down axiomatically our epistemic framework, when it comes to the application of it and when it comes to the question of "okay given this x situation what makes y contextualization reasonable and z contextualization unreasonable) most of the time, it will be very unclear how to give a clear definitve answer to those questions. It also doesn't help that I take it that discovering/realizing facts requires different norms than the contextualization of those facts (this is why we can agree on all the facts, but take different perspectives, because we don't share the same norms when it comes how and what kind of perspective should be taken given a set of facts) Yeah, I take it that most of those intuitions are grounded in the subsconscious and the content of our subconscious is largely informed by our lived experience, therefore if we largely differ when it comes to lived experience, we will have a hard time understanding each other (unless we are exceptionally good at explicating our norms and beliefs and we have a habit of reflecting on them a lot). I think this is true. This is one reason why i am not completely blackpilled when it comes to 'solving' disagreements (because in principle a lot of the disagreement can be reconciled), its just that in practice in a completely fked up media environment, this is close to impossible.

Also (even though I agree) that after we specify a goal there will be ways to progress toward that goal better than in other ways, the exact same problem (about unshared metanorms) is applicable there as well. The only reason why we can agree on whats a better way or even whats the best way to progress toward that given goal (or even on whats relevant) is because we agree on some epistemic norms that help us to make sense of the world. To check how much we progress or digress from the goal we need to know facts about the world , but what if we disagree on the facts? Well we appeal to some norms that can generate those facts, okay, but what if we disagree on those? Then we will eventually end up in a sitation where we cant agree on what make us progress or digress from the goal. I don't know in what possible way one could reconcile fundemental disagreement there. Like imagine some silly scenario where one guy has some weird epistemology where he appeals to the problem of induction (where he says there is no guarantee that laws of physics will hold up 1 second from now and that the regularities of nature can change at any moment) and this guy says that staring at the sun for 24 hours is whats necessary to crack an egg and you hitting that egg with a sledgehammer wont crack the egg

Yeah personally I don't think normative realism makes sense, I don't know what it would even mean for something to be the correct or right independent of a goal or context. I think the same goes for relevance as well - goal independent relevance doesn't make any sense, and I don't know what it would mean to say x is relevant independent of context and goal. If we introduce goals to that situation, then we can have actual code to crack. So If we introduce a set of goals attached to the 'kissing of the romantic partner for the first time' - there will be answers that are better when it comes how and when the first kiss should be done ('better'- ness in this case would be defined by how much we progress toward those attached goals). In principle, we could lay down a set of rules that would outline with 100% clarity whats the best approach (with respect to the goals we have) in that situation, its just that in practice it cant be done , because of a bunch of limitations (cognitive , resource, time , ill-defined, lack of info etc). That doesn't necessarily mean that there is only one answer, but clearly there is a hierarchy of answers (after we attach our goals to the situation) Do you have an answer to the questions I gave to aurum? Because it seems to me that if two people disagree on the answers (when it comes to these two questions or questions as such) , there is no way to solve their disagreement, because they cant appeal to anything.

Integration doesn't get you anywhere though, unless you can lay down the "right" way how to integrate things. Unless you can establish normative realism (there are objective standards for what constitutes justified belief, knowledge, or rationality, and these standards are not simply products of human conventions or subjective preferences) - all you have is puzzle pieces that you can put together in multiple ways and nothing tells you which one is the "right" way. Appealing to a subjective preference (like your preferred way of knowing or your preferred epistemic norm) won't solve this ,especially when the paradigms are mutually exclusive. Like if I ask questions like - which meta perspective should be considered valid? The "validity" there will be grounded in a subjective preference or pragmatism or If I ask the question which meta perspective should I choose from the many? The answer to that will be grounded in subjective preference or pragmatism as well. And if someone disagrees when it comes to your answer to any of those questions, you cant appeal to anything that could solve the disagreement (again unless, you can establish normative realism or if we share a same subjective normative ground). And pragmatism doesn't solve this either - because, yes, if we choose a given norm like "efficiency" we can suddenly hierarchically rank things, but nothing objectively tells you that you ought to rank things based on efficiency. And this goes to the human flourishing aspect as well - we can define and pick a norm or multiple norms to track and to measure human flourishing and then to rank political action and other things based on that, but nothing tells you that you should or you ought to rank things based on that variable/aspect - you just chose it, because you care about it.

If the claim is that their version of metaphysics would be necessarily internally incoherent, there are ways to prove that in principle, I just doubt that it will be ever established by anyone. Some presups claim kind of similar that the Christian God is logically necessary and therefore all other views necessary entail a contradiction in them - but of course, none of them could defend such a claim. I take when you say "there can only be one correct metaphysics" to mean there is no other view that can account for all the facts. I dont think thats true. Like I can grant that the Absolute is true, but even in that context , you can tackle and change certain properties of the Absolute presumably , because not all parts are logically necessary - this is similar to the idea "okay the Christian God created the world, but him creating the world is compatible with a God who has a slight preference for Eve to not eat the apple and also compatible with a God who is indifferent whether Eve eats the apple or not. Like just going with any God model where God has these two properties (all knowing, and all powerful) - you can suddenly explain all the facts of the world and there is no contradiction in such a God creating a world like this - but such a God could have a variety of other properties and preferences and desires - so you can have a million different versions of a such a God (each slightly different from the other, but all sharing the all powerful and all knowing property). Asking the question of "which one is logically necessary from the 1 million?" would be a bad question because none of them would entail a contradiction even though each is slightly different from the other. I think thats one way of knowing and it has its own limitations, just as other ways of knowing.

Because it can be useful for certain things, just as how fiction is useful or good or entertaining even if its not true or doesnt exist. But notice that we suddenly let go of epistemology and we switched to pragmatics.

I don't know what that supposed to point out. Whats the argument for that? Do you think that the rules suddenly don't hold up if you change empirical facts about the world? (because again there are obviously rules that have nothing to do with reality)

Its fine

It doesn't, all of the logic terms like 'implication' , 'validity', 'soundness' are all technical definitions with a very specific narrow meaning. No empirical observation is needed for validity to hold up in the technical sense it is defined. One main point is about figuring out what can undermine or establish a given rule (for example how do you check whether the rules of inference is true and what it even means for it to be true)? The other main point is the claim that there are rules that no empirical fact can undermine (they might be true by definition or they might be true because of its axioms or for other reasons) There are a bunch of rules and phrases and inferences where there is no empirical referent (it doesn't make any claim about the world) - in those cases how do you check whether they are true or not? Look up the problem of induction and look up propositional logic and more specifically what soundness and validity is.

Thank you for that valuable input Vynce, you might be able to earn more of his approval now. One of your life goals is achieved , I guess? Essential advice: The next part is you saying how right he is and how profound everything he says and you will be able to progress further.

Thats not the point, the point is that the rules can be applied without any need for being conscious. You can have an unconscious thing applying rules of inference and showing some of the implications (doesnt say anything about whats necessary to gather the rules, it only makes a claim about whats necessary to apply the rules) - thats the point. But this is all besides the main point because 1) this doesn't engage with the original topic at hand 2) You can believe that there is no distinction like Leo without taking any position on this particular thing (about what is needed to check entailments). Here is one thing Leo completely fails to track - if he uses the term empirical in a way 'anything that you do when you are conscious, including thinking', and if people who take the aprori position use empirical like 'observing the world, doing experiments in the world, getting sense data from the world', then you can see that the same term is used in 2 completely different ways, and there might not be even any substantial disagreement between the two position - because an apriori person could believe that thinking requires consciousness and say that thinking is non empirical given his definition , and Leo can say that thinking requires consciousness but given his unique definition of 'empirical', thinking would be categorized as an empirical thing. Substantially the two positions would be exactly the same, the label that would be put on the position would be the only different thing. And this is again not even interesting this is just semantics garbage that needs to be done, because otherwise equivocation is what happens.

Thats fine, I can say the same thing - you failed to demonstrate that you have a basic understanding of logic and how the terms and semantics are used. You lack so much on this, that you dont have the basic language to point to particular things about a given logic or an operation, and your mind cant make particular distinctions and categorizations, because you lack all of those concepts in this field. We did this play with Gödel's incompleteness theorem as well ,where you inferred a bunch of things about metaphysics that don't really apply or we don't have any good reason to think they have any connection to metaphysics the way you outlined it under scrutiny , and once you were challenged on it (it became clear that own source disagreed with you). So yes, I have good reason to think that your confidence doesn't match with the level of research you do on any of the topics surrounding math and logic. And to be clear to others, there are people who deny the apriori-aposteriori and synthetic - analytic distinctions, who also have a very good understanding of logic, and not just classical logic ,but other logics as well. They know what an implication is, what an entailment is, what a truth-table is, what the limitations of a given logic is, how proofs work , what the problem of induction is, what the rules of inference is and how to check whether they hold up or not, they know about different types of reasonings and the limitation of each and so on. There are ways to go to challenge apriori-aposteriori distinction without ever needing to equivocate.

You are changing topics and claims so rapidly you cant stay and defend one point at a time and then assume a whole baggege of views that no one took or asserted. I didnt take any position on intelligence, consciousness,understanding - what we did here is that you have made a bunch of claims about logic and then you allegedly tried to challenge the acedemic position on it, but you literally used idiosyncratic definitions that arent aligned with their view at all, and once you were called out on that you started assterting how deep and profound what you are saying and never addressed the fact that you engaged in equivocation. You dodged all of my questions, you havent clarified any of your positions and you just assumed a bunch of things about my position, you moved on with a dismissive and belittling attitude and now I am the bad guy for not quietly playing into the disimissive and submissive frame that you set up for me. Should we pretend that the belittling ,dismissive , question dodging guy were the good faith guy all along? If you dont want to engage, then dont engage, no one is forcing you to engage - I don't know why the garbage rhetoric needs to be used, where you frame other people to have an out of the conversation. Yeah, because your whole work is completely fragile and utterly allergic to any ounce of rigor and clarity. One little pushback and challenge and you immediatelly need to adapt the teacher-student frame, because its too challenging to actually address the questions and criticisms.

Just to be clear, none of what you said actually managed to challenge anything of that 'dogma'. What do you think you managed to challenge there? All you did is equivocate on the meaning of the terms, you havent responded to a single mainstream position, its like : great, you managed to critique a view that no one holds - very profound and serious work. Thats a great non-sequitur. Who was talking about "understanding", the only claim that was said to check the entailments you can use pure logic. You can claim otherwise, but you can literally run the experiment of giving a computer rules of inference and an argument and it will list you the entailments of said argument (purely applying rules of inference, no consciousness needed there). There might be more ways to collect even more social credit and approval from all forum users , you just need to assert and imply a 100 more times how intelligent you are, how everyone who challenges you are below you and it will be persuasive for everyone.

Yes you do know the "import of logic" via logic, because you just need to apply the rules of inference and you can recognize all the entailments. if P then Q ; P therefore Q. I don't need to know anything about what P is or what Q is, after laying down premise 1) If P then Q and premise 2) P, the conclusion of C) Therefore Q follows because of the rules of inference. I can switch P and Q for anything and this entailment will hold up and I don't need to know any fact about the world. All the entailments are embedded , before you apply the rules of inference, it doesn't matter when you apply it, the facts are there even before your recognize them.

All of what you are saying would be applicable to any other arbitrary set of rules. Its cool that you bring up math , because that goes against what you try to establish - a very large portion of math that is accepted to be true isn't applicable to the real world. Thats not how math work or how discovery in math work. "Umm let me go check the real world, do some experiments and then after that write down my theorems" Again, besides the fact that you havent answered a single question I asked you , and havent responded to a single problem I raised to you - you use an Idiosyncratic definition for 'observation' and especially for 'empirical' and for 'apriori' as well and then pretend that people who take apriori knowledge to be possible are committed to a position that they aren't actually committed to, you just equivocate on the meaning of those terms and use them in a completely different way than how they use them. I will ask more questions knowing that you will probably dodge all of these as well. Do you think that people who say apriori knowledge, they mean knowledge that one is borned with or truth that can be recognized without being conscious? Because the hint is that they dont, thats a complete mischaracterization of their view. None of them use the phrase 'apriori' that way. The idea is that no amount of observing the real world and no amount of experimentation and no amount of sensory input will establish or undermine any apriori truths. And so far you haven't been able to show otherwise. Your usage of empirical is Idiosyncratic as well. "Are you conscious when you recognize/realize/think , okay then thats empirical" - congratulation, you made 'empirical' an all encompassing term, but no other people use the term this way and when you try to respond to them that they are wrong, again you equivocate on the meaning of the term and you are responding to ghosts. If you want to respond to them, you need to use the terms in the way they use it. When you say A=A. What do you think 'A' refers to in the real world? What kind of embedded empirical claim is in 'A=A' ? What does 'checked by survival' even mean when there is no referent of the real world in a given phrase or rule. Again, what you are saying doesn't make any sense.

What you are saying doesnt make sense. What you are saying doesn't apply to inductive reasoning let alone to deductive rules of inference. There is a reason why there is still such a thing as a problem of induction, because you never empirically prove/investigate the rule itself, what you do is this: you take all the instances that are compatible with a given rule and then assume that the rule will apply in the future, but you have 0 way of establishing empirically that the rule true or that it exist ("Okay I have observed this x thing 5 times, therefore it will apply in the exact same way given this set of conditions"). But even when it comes to those rules, those rules are already specified (and some has embedded empirical statements in them) and even there you cannot establish what you want, but if I make the rules even more abstract (like modus ponens) that are completely devoid of empirical statements- you have 0 way to check that empirically.

You havent answered any of my questions, you conveniently sidestepped all of them. How do you empirically check/test for any rules of inference? What do you think, what kind of embedded empirical claim is in the following statement - 'If P then Q; P; Therefore Q' There is literally 0 empirical claim there, it makes no claim about the world, but go ahead show us the embedded empirical claim.

I would just say that there are certain epistemic norms (that we use in the hypothetical to investigate the number of oranges) that are compatible with multiple different kind of metaphysics (physicalism, idealism) Therefore we can solve the disagreement about the oranges by appealing to an epistemic norm that we are both okay with, without needing to first resolve our disagreement about metaphyiscs (we don't need to have the same foundation in that sense). That was my point. You seem to be saying more than that, but I don't really track that.

Right, because we are going with that level 0 epistemology meme, where we pretend that the things we arent conscious of those things arent true / they dont exist. First thats a claim that you will probably never defend, but regardless, it would be a level 0 mistake to confuse the things that are needed to for an inquiry vs what is the truthmaker (what makes a given proposition true or false). "When I think/inquire about sleeping I am conscious, therefore in order to sleep, I need to be conscious " I have no clue how thats relevant to anything that was said. But an ant cant conceptualize what gravity is, and yet it still affected by it. Never made any claims about what my position on any of that , but good try assuming though. You still havent answered my question you just asserted some vague notion of 'empirically become conscious of that' - tell us with clarity , what kind of empirical research can be done to test or to arrive at any rule of inference? First some of your questions doesn't even make sense, because the very idea that you would ask 'how do you know', assumes that it makes sense categorically to ask that question, but in this case it doesn't. Both P and Q are just abstract containers for any content that you want to use. So the idea of asking "how do you know what a P or Q is" doesn't make much sense. A 'what is' question applied to 'If' and 'therefore' seem to be incoherent as well, or I have 0 clue what is being asked there.

Aside from the fact that you can give literally any arbitrary set of rules to the computer - I shouldnt have brought up the computer example, because you managed to grab on the irrelevant part (being conscious). Please tell us , what kind of empirical investigation needs to done to arrive at or to check the rules of inference. "Let me empirically investigate the following rule of inference 'if P then Q ; P ; therefore Q' " What you are saying doesn't make any sense.

The blog post on logic is just wrong. You can literally give all the axioms and rules of a given logic to a computer and it can apply those rules and give you the results without that computer ever needing to investigate anything in the world or without it needing to know any laws of nature or without that computer having to have any conscious experience at all. You don't need to do any experiment and you don't need to observe anything in the world in order for those rules to hold up. You can change all the laws of nature and it will still hold up, it isn't depended on it at all - this is why possible world semantics appeal to laws of logic - because its compatible with an infinite number of different worlds where each world have different laws of nature. Do you think when you run a consistency check on someone's view , you actually do an empirical investigation? Tell us, what kind of empirical investigation could establish the rules of inference to be false? Modus Tollens (MT) - If P implies Q, and Q is false, then P is false. Hypothetical Syllogism (HS) - If P implies Q and Q implies R, then P implies R. Disjunctive Syllogism (DS)- If P or Q is true, and P is false, then Q is true. Addition (Add) - If P is true, then P or Q is true.

That sounds like an absolute ground would just mean a necessary precondition for all knowledge. But regardless, its seems very straightforward to me, that 2 people don't need to have the exact same metaphyiscs in order to solve disagreements about relative stuff. You can have an idealist and a physicalist solving their disagreements about how many oranges are on the table, without first needing to solve their metaphysical differences. If being can be used as the most fundamental justification, then how do you argue against someone who propose a different metaphysics than you , redefine that metaphysics as 'ultimately true' and use the same move as what you did by collapsing the distinction between epistemology and ontology and claim that his metaphysics is a necessary precondition for all knowledge? ---------------------- Here is person A's proposed metaphysics : Hi person A, why do you think you are justified in thinking that your metaphysics is true? 'Well, because its a necessary precondition for all knowledge ' And what do you take that necessary precondition to be ? 'Well, my metaphysics'. Why couldn't anyone make the exact same move with their version of metaphysics? That only make sense if you collapse the difference between epistemology and ontology. Otherwise the notion of an epistemic ground existing seems like an incoherent thing to say. What would it even mean for an epistemic method/tool to exist?