Posted by zeugma on March 30, 2006, at 21:53:56
In reply to Re: Public Expression of Religion Act , H.R. 2679, posted by special_k on March 30, 2006, at 20:34:34
> hey z...
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> i heard you disagreeing with the convergence thesis...yes, you noticed :-)
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> :-)
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> lets just check...
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> if everyone agrees on the facts (neutrally described)
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> then do you think that ideal reasoners would converge on the same judgement?
>
No. Because (and here I am plodding around in the backwaters of my own theory, a marshy region not too far from where the verificationists sank without trace, and not too far from the behaviorist promontory) there are two kinds of content: call them alpha content and beta content. Alpha content is descriptive content. We can agree on such, provided we can each verify such; for instance we concur that bananas are rich in K, because we are either chemists who perform the analyses, or else we are more the spiders weaving the web of belief into a serviceable thread for catching flies: we know what bananas are, we know what K is, we read the literature on K and its uses, and we believe the nutritionists who tell us bananas are good for us in virtue of containing K. So we swallow the story (and the banana) and acquire the belief that bananas are rich in K ('that' is of course the propositional operator tokened). The belief is the same as the one expressed by myriads of languages concerning the soon-to-be-overripe objects on my kitchen table. Alpha content is what the ancient astronomers discovered when they wrote Morning Star = Evening Star on their tablets. And it is a fact of astronomical history that numerous cultures discovered this independently, and that is convergence, correct?beta content is the Morning Star disappearing among the clouds of day. The propositional operator has not worked its magic yet. The cycles of Venus have not been 'positioned'. Since positioning has not occurred yet, convergence can't happen. (This may seem despicably similar to Jackson's 'qualia.'I'm too sleepy to get upset.)None of us can have the same beta content, because it is plain that we do not have identical percepts. Kaplan talks about Castor and pollux (I love these astronomical referents) not even knowing which is which (i.e. who they are) because they are identical in all respects, nonetheless there is different beta content because they cannot occupy the same points in space-time (conceived four dimensionally) and therefore the task of 'positioning' (getting the descriptions to work) must be somehow different (I have to make allowances for your location on Earth's surface to know what time it is where you are; I have to have alpha content, or perhaps beta content of an alpha-content-rich scroll (i.e. I am looking at a map) (and now you know one reason my bosses become infuriated with the reports I write for them; tedious and obscure phrasings of the obvious. Oh well.))
Anyway, religion. Someone believes that God exists. They may be right or wrong, but it is necessarily beta content that persuades them. I have infuriated my bosses today with incredible prolixity, and I can't stay up all night anymore removing the commas I inserted before dinner (as Oscar Wilde said of his compositional habits). But it is an awful lot of work setting up a coordinate system of alpha content that maps adequate samples of beta content onto a usable scroll. Some things just pass its limits, and such is religious experience. And as Blake said the fool does not see the tree that the wise man sees, we can't locate God on the periodic table. Morality, the same. Some people think a burning building looks great on the television (i.e., it serves some purpose of their own to find it beautiful.) And at this point, you kn ow, I am about to vomit.
-z
> (regarding morality, etc)
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> ?
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> maybe neutral description isn't possible...
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> (in which case... oh well... so long as we all manage to converge on a description)
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> but do you think ideal reasoners would agree if they start from the same knowledge base?
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> i like to think so.
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> but other people disagree.
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> went to a seminar yesterday... take the case of tony. tony hits john. hard. then he hits him again. hard. and again. hard. john wasn't a physical threat to tony.
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> court case...
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> is tony malevolent (implies he should be punished)
> or is tony self interested (shouldn't necessarily be punished)
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> all the brain facts... won't settle this issue...
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> people argue...
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> he who comes up with best justification wins.
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> sigh.
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> i don't like that.
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> philosophers do of course... lawyers do of course. i'm reminded of "The stranger". sigh.
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> but maybe ideal reasoners would converge?
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> dunno.
poster:zeugma
thread:624709
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20060322/msgs/626882.html