Like laws, languages are also socially constructed. This, the ability for things to be inconsistent applies everywhere. Imposing a structure of institutional intent will not escape this. One can say that the purpose of laws is to prevent certain actions, but then there are laws that enforce certain actions - like wearing seatbelts. For any statement or definition or problem, there are always new ways of looking at it. People are creative and will find and create new contractions. The important thing is whether we deal with the anomalies in intellectually progressive or intellectually degenerate ways.
In the UK women were only specifically denied the vote in the 1832 Great Reform Act, before that time there were occasional instances where women did meet the qualifications for voting, though apparently qualifications for the franchise varied from borough to borough. Quite often being a landowner was sufficient qualification and there was nothing in law (until 1832) to specify gender.
Emma just sent me this video, and I want to thank you for such a thoughful and careful video on this stuff! Your viewers might also enjoy this: we occasionally perform 'Contradiction Club' as a play, featuring a stuffy classical logician and an effortlessly cool dialetheist. I leave you to guess which of myself and Emma plays each role lol.
Kane B - that JC Beall move you mention (the ‘according to’ move) at 25:41 is really fascinating because there is a theory of the nature of laws which see them as claims about morality. So to have a legal obligation etc is for it to be the case that “according to law, you have a moral obligation”. would you be able to tell me where Beall makes this argument? That would be really helpful :)
Interesting topic. Philosophy of Law offers some ways to resolve these kinds of contradictions. They are usually called "apparent" contradictions, since they must be resolved in one way or another. It's said the legal system, as a whole, can provide the parameters for interpreting a particular case and then eliminate the contradiction, thus saving the coherence of the entire system.
I understand it isn't the point of the example, but for the right to vote one, I could deny that any government has the ability to give or take away rights. There are plenty of people who only believe in natural (negative) rights, not positive rights that can be granted or taken. I am sure you could construct a similar contradiction where rights aren't involved though
It's an interesting point. I guess we could just rephrase it to say that Sydney both has the legal right to vote and does not have the legal right to vote. But perhaps this makes it more plausible to say that "Sydney has the right to vote" is only true and false *within a given legal fiction*. There isn't a true contradiction here, just a contradiction within a story.
Given the type of examples here true contradictions seem to be possible under situations where some agents get to make up the rules/give truth value to some propositions and if that holds, we could on that basis argue that god can also create true contradictions because that too would be a similar case where an agent gets to decide what is and is not true because they literally make the laws.
Yeah, if we think of laws of nature as being created by God, then perhaps in principle we could get empirical contradictions by God bringing about two physical laws analogous to the voting laws in S.
@@KaneB But laws of nature are not god created, at least as far as we can see, the 'laws of nature' seem to be more accurately described as human observations than laws set down.
I think this issue turns on the combination of social ontology & epistemic constraints. It’d be too swift to say “the best this issue is doing is showing agents have contradictory intentional attitudes” because like you say (on constructivism) certain social facts constitutively depend on attitudes, so if an agent with the appropriate authority declares an incoherent attitude then it seems to follow there’re contradictory facts. My initial thoughts were: 1. If we accept classical logic we’re just going to reject there’re incoherent facts of any sort - that’s just an entailment of the logic, so something else needs revision, probably our concept of social facts & their relation to authority/legitimacy 2. Can’t we say by the same token that (given classical logic) it’s a preconditional social fact that all social facts constitutively depend on coherence - so anyone we take to be an authority declaring an incoherent attitude just isn’t an authority (at least with respect to what they’re trying to declare/make a social fact). Coherence is just baked into the notion of a legitimate social fact. So necessarily anyone who attempts to declare an incoherent social fact fails and is at best just expressing an incoherent attitude again. That move seems to preserve classical logic, social facts as attitudes, & agents having incoherent attitudes. 3. A more ballsy move would be to just reject that anyone has incoherent attitudes so the issue becomes unstateable, but I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that revenge-style paradoxes will creep in. 4. What would the conditions of satisfaction look like for an incoherent social fact? Other than the literal act of someone just saying something incoherent in a specific context - how does anyone behave in accordance with an incoherent fact? Especially if you consider normativity as an accordance relation, the whole notion of trying/success/failure becomes unintelligible then the notion of an incoherent social fact becomes unintelligible given social facts in this context determine norms & normativity. 5. Maybe there’s a de dicto/de re issue here I’m too tired and lazy to consider rn. Anyway, those were just some initial thoughts piggybacking off the end of the video. Good stuff as always, interested in if you have any criticisms.
Say two different people have contradictory beliefs & are operating under different assumptions; Wouldn't it be possible for a third party to engage both individuals & utter a phrase which would be interpreted in two different ways & nevertheless with the intent to express both things simultaneously although they might be in contradiction? (I.E. {B1:"People are fundamentally good & trustworthy", B2:~B1, U:"Child safety ornd parental rights are _very_ important to me."} )
There could be a sentence that expresses both of two contradictory claims, sure. One easy way to do this would just be to take "P" and "~P" and then conjoin them: "P & ~P". However, most philosophers would say that this sentence is false. So it's not an example of a true contradiction. There could also be a sentence that can be interpreted in two different ways, where these interpretations contradict each other. But then most philosophers would say that at least one of those interpretations is false, so this isn't an example of a true contradiction. In general, nothing prevents us from expressing contradictory propositions. The question is whether any of them are actually true.
Systems of law and the constitutions of clubs and states seem more akin to the formal systems of mathematical logic than to descriptions of aspects of the world. If they were descriptions they would be aiming at truth and the existence of 'true contradictions' would indeed be problematic. But axiomatic systems merely aim at consistency, and that is what we ask of law and constitutions. Consistency makes them implementable.
It's at least not immediately obvious that "Op & O~p" is a contradiction, in contrast to "Op & ~Op". Maybe there is some deontic logic inference I am not aware of here.
Sorry but, can I just say that if i was the second contract writer (gona guess a solicitor of some sort) I would simply ask "so before we get started..do you have any contracts that we should know about?"
Okay, so the proposed contradiction is the following: _"Sydney has the right to vote and Sydney does not have the right to vote."_ Let's do a semantic analysis on these conjuncts: _"Sydney has the right to vote."_ What is meant by this? I take it to mean "There is a law in place in Society S that allows Sydney to vote". That is true under the scenario. _"Sydney does not have the right to vote."_ If by this we mean the negation of "There is a law in place in Society S that allows Sydney to vote", then we get "There is not a law in place in Society S that allows Sydney to vote". That's false though under the scenario. So, I take this to mean "There is a law in place in Society S that prevents Sydney from voting", which is true under the scenario. Using these interpretations, upon semantic analysis, we get the following conjunction: _"There is a law in place in Society S that allows Sydney to vote and there is a law in place in Society S that prevents Sydney from voting."_ That's true under the scenario, but that's P∧Q, which is not a contradictory statement. Thus, I believe the proposed contradiction "Sydney has the right to vote and Sydney does not have the right to vote" is equivocational where, upon semantic analysis, the left conjunct and the right conjunct are not truly the negations of each other.
The first rule of contradiction club is you DON'T talk about contradiction club. The second rule of contradiction club is you DO talk about contradiction club! ...I'll see myself out. 😂
The fourth rule of contradiction club is that the rules of contradiction club contain no contradictions. The fifth rule of contradiction club is that contradiction club has exactly three rules.
I actually argue for Dialetheism as a matter of fact of the world. My argument goes something like logic really has nothing stopping it from being untrue, or making it true, therefore, the law of non-contradiction is not so much a law after all. Heck, logic can't really reaffirm its own validity since to do so would be circular reasoning.
@@Cecilia-ky3uw Logic cannot deductively justify the Law, but that doesn't mean you're reasonable to think that it's truth or falsehood are equally likely. All of your experience affirms it. None of it refutes it. The law seems to have held true for all of human history and nothing seems to suggest otherwise.
@@PhilSophia-ox7ep induction is a logical matter- it cannot be proven and it is such a problem to humans that we have the problem of induction despite an adherence to logic.
Contracts: Having listened to that, I reject the claim that "being obligated not to do" necessarily implies "not being obligated to do". I accept your counterexample. Laws: I'm surprised you didn't entertain the possibility, since Sydney is a landowner, and all landowners are voters, and all voters are women, that Sydney is a woman! (This is a joke.) In English jurisprudence, legal contradictions are almost always resolvable (by the principle of lex posterior, as you cited, for example), but contradictions can occur between the Human Rights Act (1998) and later statutes. In such cases, a judge may make a declaration of incompatibility. The incompatibility may only be resolved legislatively. In the meantime, however, the provisions of the non-HRA statute apply. Clubs: Don't we just wait to see what happens when Graham tries to change the radio station? Perhaps all social facts are fictions.
Much more interestingly than the topic of the video itself, I am intensely curious what exactly you think about 13:00 (whether legal stipulation can make pi be 3).
At the end of the day Sydney will either be barred from voting or not. If barred, then Sydney does not have a right to vote. If allowed, then Sydney has a right to vote. If Sydney somehow manages to cast a vote _and_ abstain from voting at the same time, then I will be impressed. But we know that won't happen, because contradictions are impossible.
Yes, once we either allow Sydney to cast the vote, or we prevent Sydney from casting the vote, we might say that this is a consistent situation; one of those laws will be taken to trump the other. But what about the time prior to Sydney's attempting the cast the vote? I suppose we could say that, if Sydney is permitted to cast the vote at time t, then it will be timelessly true (and not also false) that Sydney has the right to vote, so that it is also true (and not also false) at the earlier time t-1 that Sydney has the right to vote. Though I think that, if anything is timelessly true, it should be the proposition "Sydney has the right to vote at time t"; after all, the law might be changed again in the future such that Sydney's right to vote is removed. But then what do we say about the proposition "Sydney has the right to vote at time t-1"? Moreover, what if Sydney never attempts to vote? Suppose that Sydney is the only landowning male in S (the process by which a man can become a landowner in S is very unusual indeed). And suppose that Sydney just isn't interested in voting. So the problem of whether to allow Sydney to vote, or whether to prevent him, just never arises. Then what makes it just true, or just false, that Sydney has the right to vote?
@@KaneB You have bolstered my position and smashed it anyway, like a true philosopher 😁 Let's see if I can still hold on to classical logic here... If we take seriously the idea that contradictions are false (as the classical truth table shows), then it seems I'm forced to say "Sydney has a right to vote" is a false proposition at time t - 1. But how could it be false? If "Sydney has a right to vote" means "Sydney can cast a vote on voting day without violating any voting laws." then this is false. The law "All landowners can vote (without violating any other laws)" is rendered false with Sydney as a counterexample.
Thoughts as I watch, likely to be superseded by stuff that comes later: 'P and not P' is just the same as 'False'. If I am obligated to ensure that 'False', then I just have an obligation that (regardless of any facts) I cannot fulfill, so I'm unconditionally subject to the consequences of failing to fulfill my obligation. That is not a problem for any conventional view, as far as I'm aware. If this happens within a system of deontology in which being obligated to ensure that not-P is supposed to guarantee that one is not obligated to ensure that P, that just means that the system has failed to assign duties in a way that meets its standards of coherence. Again, not a problem. Of course we can fail to formulate a deontology that satisfies the criteria we set for ourselves when we started trying to formulate our deontology. If we try to form a law code instead, that doesn't change anything: it's still unproblematic that we can set up a system that fails to do what we wanted it to do. And again, if we coin "social fact" as a term of art, try to formulate a set of criteria to describe what constitutes a social fact, and wind up with gibberish instead, there's nothing problematic: we set out to do something, and we failed to do it. Or if we don't have outright gibberish, just something that can't be applied to everything we intended it to apply to, we still just have an ordinary failure. A bit later, it sounds as though what we have is vagueness. We can use statements like "Penelope is president of the APA" without having to worry about goofy edge cases, because the edge cases don't matter. We can imagine a scenario where Penelope has been duly appointed president, the rules specify that there's an impeachment committee that can remove a president from office, and this action is specified to take effect instantaneously. Then we can imagine that the impeachment committee is meeting on Sedna out in the Oort cloud, and it takes over five days for light to travel from the committee's location on Sedna to Penelope's location on Earth. Assuming that the rules didn't address the effects of special relativity, they failed to specify whether or not Penelope is president while she and her removal are separated by a space-like interval instead of a time-like interval. The correct response to this scenario is not "ok, the rules have to be interpreted one way or another, so that they specify whether she's president". The correct response is "so what, who cares". The rules can be left vague, because no one is going to be farther than a couple light-seconds away any time soon. No matter how we might want to define "social fact", it will never be reasonable to do so in a way that seriously attempts to eliminate every trace of vagueness. Is Graham really the High Priest of Contradiction Club? Who cares. Trying to spell out the rules so as to eliminate goofy edge cases is stupid, and we shouldn't do it, even if there's a club out there who will ruthlessly seek out and enact whatever edge case we leave unaddressed. Maybe especially if there's such a club. The things we use in ordinary discussion aren't exactly propositions. Perfectly-logical propositions are an idealization, like infinitely small points or ideal gases. In most cases, the things we call propositions can reasonably be called propositions, because, sure, they have some vagueness, but the vagueness can be resolved if we need to resolve it. When we do metamathematics, we take 2+2=4 as a familiar truth. If an attempt to put arithmetic on a sound axiomatic basis fails to reconstitute 2+2=4, that doesn't mean that 2+2 doesn't equal 4. It means we have a failed attempt. And again, when we fail to specify something by making two contradictory declarations about it, we've still failed to specify it. Giving people incoherent instructions doesn't create two different sets of facts about how people behave. Even if they follow all the instructions to the best of their ability, in cases where the instructions can reasonably be interpreted in ways that are coherent, there's only one set of facts describing their inconsistent behavior. You can coin "social fact" as a term of art, but that's just calling a tail a leg. I can call 2+2=5 and 2+2=6 both "one-keystroke-typo facts", but having the word "fact" as part of a name doesn't mean that it really is a type of fact.
It seems a bit overly dramatic to say "all claims about social roles are false." Couldn't we just say that social facts are a matter of consensus, so they are more or less true, strictly speaking, to the degree they are treated as such by the group in question? In ordinary conversation, we can say that so and so is or is not the president, full stop. But there's a non-zero number of people who disagree, and as that number increases there comes a point where that claim looks pretty silly.
Kane B and contadictions. Both name and dont name a more iconic duo
{"She who must not be named", "George Orwell"}
({"RiggerMortis", "Quantum Immortality"})
Like laws, languages are also socially constructed. This, the ability for things to be inconsistent applies everywhere. Imposing a structure of institutional intent will not escape this. One can say that the purpose of laws is to prevent certain actions, but then there are laws that enforce certain actions - like wearing seatbelts. For any statement or definition or problem, there are always new ways of looking at it. People are creative and will find and create new contractions. The important thing is whether we deal with the anomalies in intellectually progressive or intellectually degenerate ways.
Erwin Schrödinger walked so Graham Priest could walk and not walk
In the UK women were only specifically denied the vote in the 1832 Great Reform Act, before that time there were occasional instances where women did meet the qualifications for voting, though apparently qualifications for the franchise varied from borough to borough. Quite often being a landowner was sufficient qualification and there was nothing in law (until 1832) to specify gender.
Emma just sent me this video, and I want to thank you for such a thoughful and careful video on this stuff! Your viewers might also enjoy this: we occasionally perform 'Contradiction Club' as a play, featuring a stuffy classical logician and an effortlessly cool dialetheist. I leave you to guess which of myself and Emma plays each role lol.
Kane B - that JC Beall move you mention (the ‘according to’ move) at 25:41 is really fascinating because there is a theory of the nature of laws which see them as claims about morality. So to have a legal obligation etc is for it to be the case that “according to law, you have a moral obligation”. would you be able to tell me where Beall makes this argument? That would be really helpful :)
Interesting topic. Philosophy of Law offers some ways to resolve these kinds of contradictions. They are usually called "apparent" contradictions, since they must be resolved in one way or another. It's said the legal system, as a whole, can provide the parameters for interpreting a particular case and then eliminate the contradiction, thus saving the coherence of the entire system.
I understand it isn't the point of the example, but for the right to vote one, I could deny that any government has the ability to give or take away rights. There are plenty of people who only believe in natural (negative) rights, not positive rights that can be granted or taken. I am sure you could construct a similar contradiction where rights aren't involved though
Rights aren't an objective feature of the world, they are a collection of social contracts generally between states and individuals.
It's an interesting point. I guess we could just rephrase it to say that Sydney both has the legal right to vote and does not have the legal right to vote. But perhaps this makes it more plausible to say that "Sydney has the right to vote" is only true and false *within a given legal fiction*. There isn't a true contradiction here, just a contradiction within a story.
Natural rights and negative rights are not the same though
Given the type of examples here true contradictions seem to be possible under situations where some agents get to make up the rules/give truth value to some propositions and if that holds, we could on that basis argue that god can also create true contradictions because that too would be a similar case where an agent gets to decide what is and is not true because they literally make the laws.
Yeah, if we think of laws of nature as being created by God, then perhaps in principle we could get empirical contradictions by God bringing about two physical laws analogous to the voting laws in S.
@@KaneB But laws of nature are not god created, at least as far as we can see, the 'laws of nature' seem to be more accurately described as human observations than laws set down.
I think this issue turns on the combination of social ontology & epistemic constraints. It’d be too swift to say “the best this issue is doing is showing agents have contradictory intentional attitudes” because like you say (on constructivism) certain social facts constitutively depend on attitudes, so if an agent with the appropriate authority declares an incoherent attitude then it seems to follow there’re contradictory facts. My initial thoughts were: 1. If we accept classical logic we’re just going to reject there’re incoherent facts of any sort - that’s just an entailment of the logic, so something else needs revision, probably our concept of social facts & their relation to authority/legitimacy 2. Can’t we say by the same token that (given classical logic) it’s a preconditional social fact that all social facts constitutively depend on coherence - so anyone we take to be an authority declaring an incoherent attitude just isn’t an authority (at least with respect to what they’re trying to declare/make a social fact). Coherence is just baked into the notion of a legitimate social fact. So necessarily anyone who attempts to declare an incoherent social fact fails and is at best just expressing an incoherent attitude again. That move seems to preserve classical logic, social facts as attitudes, & agents having incoherent attitudes. 3. A more ballsy move would be to just reject that anyone has incoherent attitudes so the issue becomes unstateable, but I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that revenge-style paradoxes will creep in. 4. What would the conditions of satisfaction look like for an incoherent social fact? Other than the literal act of someone just saying something incoherent in a specific context - how does anyone behave in accordance with an incoherent fact? Especially if you consider normativity as an accordance relation, the whole notion of trying/success/failure becomes unintelligible then the notion of an incoherent social fact becomes unintelligible given social facts in this context determine norms & normativity. 5. Maybe there’s a de dicto/de re issue here I’m too tired and lazy to consider rn.
Anyway, those were just some initial thoughts piggybacking off the end of the video. Good stuff as always, interested in if you have any criticisms.
Say two different people have contradictory beliefs & are operating under different assumptions; Wouldn't it be possible for a third party to engage both individuals & utter a phrase which would be interpreted in two different ways & nevertheless with the intent to express both things simultaneously although they might be in contradiction?
(I.E. {B1:"People are fundamentally good & trustworthy", B2:~B1, U:"Child safety ornd parental rights are _very_ important to me."} )
There could be a sentence that expresses both of two contradictory claims, sure. One easy way to do this would just be to take "P" and "~P" and then conjoin them: "P & ~P". However, most philosophers would say that this sentence is false. So it's not an example of a true contradiction. There could also be a sentence that can be interpreted in two different ways, where these interpretations contradict each other. But then most philosophers would say that at least one of those interpretations is false, so this isn't an example of a true contradiction. In general, nothing prevents us from expressing contradictory propositions. The question is whether any of them are actually true.
Systems of law and the constitutions of clubs and states seem more akin to the formal systems of mathematical logic than to descriptions of aspects of the world. If they were descriptions they would be aiming at truth and the existence of 'true contradictions' would indeed be problematic. But axiomatic systems merely aim at consistency, and that is what we ask of law and constitutions. Consistency makes them implementable.
It's at least not immediately obvious that "Op & O~p" is a contradiction, in contrast to "Op & ~Op". Maybe there is some deontic logic inference I am not aware of here.
He mentions in the video
Keep watching and report back in two minutes... 😉
@@yoavco99
I wasn't able to fully watch it yet
Bad habit of commenting before fully watching
@@KaneB yeah lol, should have more foresight in the future haha
@@KaneBsBett It's good lol, all comments feed the algorithm.
I'd love to see you do an in-depth analysis of the implications of dielithism
Sorry but, can I just say that if i was the second contract writer (gona guess a solicitor of some sort) I would simply ask "so before we get started..do you have any contracts that we should know about?"
Okay, so the proposed contradiction is the following:
_"Sydney has the right to vote and Sydney does not have the right to vote."_
Let's do a semantic analysis on these conjuncts:
_"Sydney has the right to vote."_
What is meant by this? I take it to mean "There is a law in place in Society S that allows Sydney to vote". That is true under the scenario.
_"Sydney does not have the right to vote."_
If by this we mean the negation of "There is a law in place in Society S that allows Sydney to vote", then we get "There is not a law in place in Society S that allows Sydney to vote". That's false though under the scenario. So, I take this to mean "There is a law in place in Society S that prevents Sydney from voting", which is true under the scenario. Using these interpretations, upon semantic analysis, we get the following conjunction:
_"There is a law in place in Society S that allows Sydney to vote and there is a law in place in Society S that prevents Sydney from voting."_
That's true under the scenario, but that's P∧Q, which is not a contradictory statement.
Thus, I believe the proposed contradiction "Sydney has the right to vote and Sydney does not have the right to vote" is equivocational where, upon semantic analysis, the left conjunct and the right conjunct are not truly the negations of each other.
The first rule of contradiction club is you DON'T talk about contradiction club.
The second rule of contradiction club is you DO talk about contradiction club!
...I'll see myself out. 😂
The third rule of contradiction club is that there are no rules of contradiction club 😎🤘
The fourth rule of contradiction club is that the rules of contradiction club contain no contradictions.
The fifth rule of contradiction club is that contradiction club has exactly three rules.
Nice mate cheerio 🥂
I actually argue for Dialetheism as a matter of fact of the world. My argument goes something like logic really has nothing stopping it from being untrue, or making it true, therefore, the law of non-contradiction is not so much a law after all. Heck, logic can't really reaffirm its own validity since to do so would be circular reasoning.
Nothing stopping it from being untrue does not mean it is untrue nor that there are true contradictions.
@@PhilSophia-ox7ep logic cannot actually affirm the law of non contradiction, at the very least, I have no choice but to be equally open to it.
@@Cecilia-ky3uw Logic cannot deductively justify the Law, but that doesn't mean you're reasonable to think that it's truth or falsehood are equally likely. All of your experience affirms it. None of it refutes it. The law seems to have held true for all of human history and nothing seems to suggest otherwise.
@@PhilSophia-ox7ep induction is a logical matter- it cannot be proven and it is such a problem to humans that we have the problem of induction despite an adherence to logic.
Contracts: Having listened to that, I reject the claim that "being obligated not to do" necessarily implies "not being obligated to do". I accept your counterexample.
Laws: I'm surprised you didn't entertain the possibility, since Sydney is a landowner, and all landowners are voters, and all voters are women, that Sydney is a woman! (This is a joke.) In English jurisprudence, legal contradictions are almost always resolvable (by the principle of lex posterior, as you cited, for example), but contradictions can occur between the Human Rights Act (1998) and later statutes. In such cases, a judge may make a declaration of incompatibility. The incompatibility may only be resolved legislatively. In the meantime, however, the provisions of the non-HRA statute apply.
Clubs: Don't we just wait to see what happens when Graham tries to change the radio station?
Perhaps all social facts are fictions.
Much more interestingly than the topic of the video itself, I am intensely curious what exactly you think about 13:00 (whether legal stipulation can make pi be 3).
At the end of the day Sydney will either be barred from voting or not. If barred, then Sydney does not have a right to vote. If allowed, then Sydney has a right to vote. If Sydney somehow manages to cast a vote _and_ abstain from voting at the same time, then I will be impressed. But we know that won't happen, because contradictions are impossible.
Yes, once we either allow Sydney to cast the vote, or we prevent Sydney from casting the vote, we might say that this is a consistent situation; one of those laws will be taken to trump the other. But what about the time prior to Sydney's attempting the cast the vote? I suppose we could say that, if Sydney is permitted to cast the vote at time t, then it will be timelessly true (and not also false) that Sydney has the right to vote, so that it is also true (and not also false) at the earlier time t-1 that Sydney has the right to vote. Though I think that, if anything is timelessly true, it should be the proposition "Sydney has the right to vote at time t"; after all, the law might be changed again in the future such that Sydney's right to vote is removed. But then what do we say about the proposition "Sydney has the right to vote at time t-1"?
Moreover, what if Sydney never attempts to vote? Suppose that Sydney is the only landowning male in S (the process by which a man can become a landowner in S is very unusual indeed). And suppose that Sydney just isn't interested in voting. So the problem of whether to allow Sydney to vote, or whether to prevent him, just never arises. Then what makes it just true, or just false, that Sydney has the right to vote?
@@KaneB You have bolstered my position and smashed it anyway, like a true philosopher 😁
Let's see if I can still hold on to classical logic here...
If we take seriously the idea that contradictions are false (as the classical truth table shows), then it seems I'm forced to say "Sydney has a right to vote" is a false proposition at time t - 1. But how could it be false?
If "Sydney has a right to vote" means "Sydney can cast a vote on voting day without violating any voting laws." then this is false.
The law "All landowners can vote (without violating any other laws)" is rendered false with Sydney as a counterexample.
@@KaneBsounds like a quantum superposition that collapses once observed.
Thoughts as I watch, likely to be superseded by stuff that comes later:
'P and not P' is just the same as 'False'. If I am obligated to ensure that 'False', then I just have an obligation that (regardless of any facts) I cannot fulfill, so I'm unconditionally subject to the consequences of failing to fulfill my obligation. That is not a problem for any conventional view, as far as I'm aware. If this happens within a system of deontology in which being obligated to ensure that not-P is supposed to guarantee that one is not obligated to ensure that P, that just means that the system has failed to assign duties in a way that meets its standards of coherence. Again, not a problem. Of course we can fail to formulate a deontology that satisfies the criteria we set for ourselves when we started trying to formulate our deontology. If we try to form a law code instead, that doesn't change anything: it's still unproblematic that we can set up a system that fails to do what we wanted it to do. And again, if we coin "social fact" as a term of art, try to formulate a set of criteria to describe what constitutes a social fact, and wind up with gibberish instead, there's nothing problematic: we set out to do something, and we failed to do it. Or if we don't have outright gibberish, just something that can't be applied to everything we intended it to apply to, we still just have an ordinary failure.
A bit later, it sounds as though what we have is vagueness. We can use statements like "Penelope is president of the APA" without having to worry about goofy edge cases, because the edge cases don't matter. We can imagine a scenario where Penelope has been duly appointed president, the rules specify that there's an impeachment committee that can remove a president from office, and this action is specified to take effect instantaneously. Then we can imagine that the impeachment committee is meeting on Sedna out in the Oort cloud, and it takes over five days for light to travel from the committee's location on Sedna to Penelope's location on Earth. Assuming that the rules didn't address the effects of special relativity, they failed to specify whether or not Penelope is president while she and her removal are separated by a space-like interval instead of a time-like interval. The correct response to this scenario is not "ok, the rules have to be interpreted one way or another, so that they specify whether she's president". The correct response is "so what, who cares". The rules can be left vague, because no one is going to be farther than a couple light-seconds away any time soon. No matter how we might want to define "social fact", it will never be reasonable to do so in a way that seriously attempts to eliminate every trace of vagueness. Is Graham really the High Priest of Contradiction Club? Who cares. Trying to spell out the rules so as to eliminate goofy edge cases is stupid, and we shouldn't do it, even if there's a club out there who will ruthlessly seek out and enact whatever edge case we leave unaddressed. Maybe especially if there's such a club.
The things we use in ordinary discussion aren't exactly propositions. Perfectly-logical propositions are an idealization, like infinitely small points or ideal gases. In most cases, the things we call propositions can reasonably be called propositions, because, sure, they have some vagueness, but the vagueness can be resolved if we need to resolve it. When we do metamathematics, we take 2+2=4 as a familiar truth. If an attempt to put arithmetic on a sound axiomatic basis fails to reconstitute 2+2=4, that doesn't mean that 2+2 doesn't equal 4. It means we have a failed attempt.
And again, when we fail to specify something by making two contradictory declarations about it, we've still failed to specify it. Giving people incoherent instructions doesn't create two different sets of facts about how people behave. Even if they follow all the instructions to the best of their ability, in cases where the instructions can reasonably be interpreted in ways that are coherent, there's only one set of facts describing their inconsistent behavior. You can coin "social fact" as a term of art, but that's just calling a tail a leg. I can call 2+2=5 and 2+2=6 both "one-keystroke-typo facts", but having the word "fact" as part of a name doesn't mean that it really is a type of fact.
Hmm. This tab was still open, but there's no duration already watched. So I don't know whether I finished the video or not.
It seems a bit overly dramatic to say "all claims about social roles are false." Couldn't we just say that social facts are a matter of consensus, so they are more or less true, strictly speaking, to the degree they are treated as such by the group in question? In ordinary conversation, we can say that so and so is or is not the president, full stop. But there's a non-zero number of people who disagree, and as that number increases there comes a point where that claim looks pretty silly.
my head hurts
Any opinion on the latest Alex O'connor and Sam Harris debate? too hobbyist, or actually useful to the public/good?
The right conclusion is that sidney is a woman
🎉🎉🎉
I’m gonna greet everyone in my head by thinking “2+2=5” from now on. 😉
Justice for ruby claire
contradictory statements exist while contradictory actions do not exist
I'm not even going to leave a comment on this one.
It's contradictory to watch the video and not be compelled to like and comment.
Engaging