Necessary Truths Exist

[Rational AKD]

Okay? We're discussing the philosophical side of it, not the 'common' usage (which when probed leads to equivocations.

no, because in philosophy you can take any definition of a word for an argument, since the definitions would be part of the premises. so long as you remain consistent with your definitions, you can reach your philosophical conclusion using the rules of logic. it doesn't matter if I conform to a subjective philosophical definition of truth or not, so long as it is defined and used consistently in the argument.

Old posts, as in just 2 back? Wow, okay. You're 'even if you're right' argument doesn't work either, as I'll sho in a moment.

yes, I apologize; what I said 2 posts earlier was poorly worded.

If you're not talking about propositions, you're not talking about truth in philosophy. Again, conflating truth and facts leads to nonsensical equivocations.

that's why I switched my word usage from proposition to fact, from truth to real. what you're saying really isn't devastating to my argument, it's just complaining about semantics. and you accuse me of equivocation by equivocating truth and reality but the fact is i'm not making any logical conclusions different if I were to use those different words. i'm still being consistent with the definitions I assigned to the terms so i'm not committing that fallacy.

They're not equivocal as you yourself have already admitted. And I demonstrated in my explanation involving circles that replacing all instances of 'real' with 'true' leads to antinomies. Things that exist are 'real'. Statements affirming that 'X exists' are true. Reversing that makes no sense, and doesn't even apply any philosophical notion of true correctly, as my earlier circle examples demonstrated.

it only makes no sense if you ignore the fact that statements about "X exists" are also statements about what's "real" so saying the statement is about reality is accurate, just skipping an intermediate step.

Further, hand-waivingly saying that I'm just playing with semantics is not a valid criticism, especially since the distinction is important and what is making you run into errors.

the point I had you're playing semantics was shown valid by the adequate change I made to the argument and the fact that it had no change in the conclusions made.

You're equivocating on them, but they are not equivocal, as my earlier unpacking (again, the circles example) demonstrated.

i'm sorry, but did I say anywhere that they are not equivocal? I certainly the only one who said they are not equivocal (besides you) was genkaus to which I immediately responded rejecting that statement here:

the ones that are expressions of existence are equivocal, however. when I say "it is true that the sun exists" it can easily be taken as "the sun is real."

Post modernist philosophy, are you kidding me? This is the last-ditch attempt of your to save yourself the embarrassment of a bad argument.

Post modernist philosophy, are you kidding me? This is the last-ditch attempt of your to save yourself the embarrassment of a bad argument. Contemporary philosophy is very advanced and developed, with epistemology being a real standout. The correspondence theory of truth alone is THOUSANDS of years old, going back at least to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

so you're saying modern philosophy by giving an example of ancient philosophy... nice... anyways, i'm not saying modern philosophy is bad, i'm specifically targeting post modern philosophy saying it's taking steps backwards. if you knew anything about it, you would agree. it's saying we can't know what reality is which is pretty much nullifying physical sciences and studies.
http://www.postmodernpreaching.net/postm...sophy.html

The reason why there are theories of truth is because in Epistemology, knowledge is typically defined as a true belief, with some third element. But the question becomes, "what do you mean by 'true'?"

I gave a clear definition, it is what's actually real. you claim there's a problem with equivocation with this, I claim the two are equivocal. a proposition about a statement about reality is still ultimately a proposition about reality. how do we know it's true? many times we don't, and we must accept things we thought were true really aren't. but if there is a proof, then we can accept it undeniably, such as the statement "I think therefore I am."

It's a skeptical view, but it's not solipsistic.

it's still solipsist, just not extreme solipsist. there are different kinds of solipsism, and you're taking a more skeptical version. i'll let wiki show you:

Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist... Epistemological solipsism is the variety of idealism according to which only the directly accessible mental contents of the solipsistic philosopher can be known. The existence of an external world is regarded as an unresolvable question rather than actually false.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

you would be taking the epistemological idealism rather than the metaphysical idealism as wiki describes.

For example, indirect realists like me don't think we experience reality itself, but a mental reproduction of it via sense data, all the while not claiming to actually know that we do.

many solipsists use the "brain in a vat" possibility to justify their view, so you'll have to do better than that to call yourself a realist. a realist would believe everything we experience would exist even if we weren't here to experience it. if you don't believe me, ask wiki again:

Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief that our reality, or some aspect of it, is ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, perceptions, linguistic practices, beliefs, etchttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_realism

After all, pretty much all positions here are just assumptions, thanks to the Kantian distinction, which can be summed up as "We only have access, necessarily, to our PERCEPTION of reality, not reality itself, so we can't our perceptions necessarily map to twhatever might be behind those perceptions".

no, we can't necessarily map our perceptions to reality, but truth is not our perception of reality but rather what is actually part of reality. whether that reality exists or not is a different topic, the only reality we have direct access to is the reality of our own thought. this is undeniable, because you can't observe something if you're not conscious. but truth can still refer to an independent reality, assuming one exists.

What you seemed to be impying (perhaps accidentally) at one point is that if solipsism were true, the illusion didn't exist.

no, what I've been saying this entire time is the illusion would exist in your mind, but wouldn't have its own independent existence, just as the rest of your thoughts don't. I agree thoughts exist but not outside the mind, and if solipsism was true, the world would exist but not independent of your mind (the believer's mind).

My only points on idealism and realism is that they are not provable, hence why I brought up Kant's distinction.

that's not what I disputed and i'm not disputing it now.

You actually altered the statement to support your view. The proposition obviously has a context in the sense of when it's made, but whether or not something is actually true changes depending on what is factual.

first, I didn't alter the statement, "Obama is the president" is exactly the statement that we've been discussing. you're stating that it's true now but now always, i'm stating the statement represents now and thus doesn't become wrong over time. second, yes, facts change, but whether something is true or not depends on which fact it represents. in a book written 1985 stating "Regan is the president" it has a reference to the current date, 1985, thus does not become wrong simply because the facts have changed. it only becomes wrong when it represents the wrong fact, time in this case. it becomes wrong when it references the wrong date.

And this doesn't work, because I can just as easily say 'Ted Cruz is the president' and clearly that is false NOW, but if it happens in 2016 (God help us if it does...), then that statement is then true. The fact to which that proposition referred changed, because reality changed.

I think we're talking about two different scenarios. in mine, I state the current president and it's looked back upon and analyzed. in that case, the statement is still true since it still makes the reference to that time. in your scenario, you would make the statement at one time, and it's right, but restate it later and it's wrong. in that case, one would be wrong because it's making a different reference. there's a difference made in a tense statement made now and the exact same statement made later, since it's obviously time based hence the use of tense. but a statement made then still doesn't change to wrong now since it still represents then.

They wouldn't be correct anymore, so the proposition has to be retroactively appended to retain its truth value.

the appending is only necessary to retain the same reference of time in the statement, but it doesn't make any change to the statement's meaning by appending the use of tense over time. and i'm talking about truth in meaning, not semantics, so you can't say "even if they don't change meaning, they still change it." if there's no change in the meaning of the statement, there's no change in the truth of it, only the semantics.

I said that Jupiter being the largest planet is a fact. I didn't say it was impossible to reference a fact (there's that straw man again)

I wasn't strawmanning, because if you pay attention I said it seems to me that you have the impression. I didn't say you actually are saying or implying that.

I said in a possible world without minds and thus without propositions, "Jupiter is the largest planet" would neither be true nor false, because that proposition can't even be made in that scenario, and only propositions (not reality itself) have the properties of truthyness and falsity.

ok fine, i'm moving beyond that scope to talk about its actual existence rather than the truth of its existence. that's why I reworded the argument.

Sorry about that. As I said on page 2 or 3, there's a YT video called the 'Leibnizian Cosmplogical argument' that features a similar argument trying to establish God's existence as a necessary truth.

that would be a step beyond this argument, but I don't quite know how to get there from this conclusion. so I've started it off as a philosophical argument leaving the option to expand it into a religious one if I find out how to do it.

The reason I used 'fact' there is because those laws refer to facts, namely that things are themselves and aren't not themselves.

i'm not criticizing your use of the word fact. it's merely the only difference between what I said and what you said.

However, I also noted a couple of posts back that even the Laws of identity and non-contradiction aren't above criticism of their applicability, even if I disagree. After all, paraconsistent logic is able to deny non-contradiction, and I think there is a logical system or two that treats even identity as contingent. So while there might be truths that are necessary, even philosophers can't exactly agree which ones are it.

paraconsistent logic doesn't invalidate non-contradiction, and I don't know of any logical system that does. i'll let Stanford handle this one:

Nevertheless, as we will see below, many paraconsistent logics validate the Law of Non-Contradiciton (LNC) (⊨ ¬(A ∧ ¬A)) even though they invalidate ECQ [ex contradictione quodlibet].
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-paraconsistent/

The problem is that to do that, you'd have to, among other things, void the paraconsistent logical framework.

paraconsistant logic doesn't invalidate non-contradiction, only ex contradictione quodlibet (in English 'from a contradiction anything follows').

Another straw man; how surprising.

straw man? are you serious? all I did was try and correct myself to appease you. I didn't even say anything about what you said, merely corrected my mistake and my correction is somehow a straw man?

Without minds, there arw no propositions. Truth and falsity are ONLY applicable to propositions. Hence, a possible world without minds has no truth or falsity in it.

that's why I corrected the statement I made to confirm this. man, what does it take for you to understand i'm talking about me not you.

Facts would remain (Jupiter being the largest planet), but truth would not (the proposition "Jupiter is the largest planet" has no truth value in such a possible world.).

good, i'm glad you agree with the amended statement I made. finally we can move on (maybe).