Plotin,

Normally I do not follow what you write(perhaps a language barrier?). The above though, I believe highlights what very well could be one of my own incompetences being at play here. Although I cannot see how infinity plays a role here, self consciousness obviously does. More relevent to my notion of universal morality perhaps, would be how one is taught to view themself. Emotions, original, and adopted belief are all very relevent factors. The potential show of incompetence on my part is in this...

...It is indeed something hard to believe as finitely reasoned as NOT observed but empirical...

I believe that this encapsulates something inherent in my claims here. While understanding the importance of evidence being objectively demonstrable, I think that I have presupposed that logical argument alone constitutes being empirical evidence. Perhaps I am conflating between empirical and objective. I am unsure of the repurcussions should this be true... thinking out loud, here.

I remember I was offended over the question concerning "Is there any logical thinking outside of Man's reality, possibly just the Being before Man in the World, some natural world phenomenon". I believed it had to do with the natural sequential thing in Kant's Parralogisms of Pure Reason. I was really being incompetent there as well.

Don't worry about it. The logic applies to all of us, or just you or me. The logic also was meant to be learned from the a priori worth in the type of reading approached or not; was meant to be concerned in mathematics as well as philosophy. But you aren't Yada-yada. Are you?

I worked at the parralogisms objectively with effort (sort'a) at the detachable Object. Time may be important to competence for considering the next issue of that question. Is objectivity different in certain regions of Being than others?

But I guess: it's all in Yada-yada temporality.

I am fairly certain that I work mostly from an empiricist/determinist position when it comes to what constitutes whether or not potential evidence is relevent and sufficient enough to warrant a conclusion. However, I am unsure if that contradicts my attempts at using reason/logic as evidence. I mean, when talking about human behavior, we have the behavior itself as objective evidence, but when talking about how one frames their own thought after experience becomes a variable, it becomes a completely different story. I am thinking that Yada was referring to that notion earlier? Yada, whaddaya think here?

If there are universally shared moral elements in humans prior to our having developed a belief system/understanding and those can be reasonably and/or logically shown as necessarily following from empiricist grounds, then we have something substantial to say about morality outside of 'ought'. In this case at least, my aim is to first show how and why the conventional conception of morality is fallacy.

I believe that I have given sufficient reason to justify my claims regarding morality thus far. If someone sees an issue, I would hope that they would find it within them to point it out.

creativesoul wrote: I am fairly certain that I work mostly from an empiricist/determinist position when it comes to what constitutes whether or not potential evidence is relevent and sufficient enough to warrant a conclusion. However, I am unsure if that contradicts my attempts at using reason/logic as evidence. I mean, when talking about human behavior, we have the behavior itself as objective evidence, but when talking about how one frames their own thought after experience becomes a variable, it becomes a completely different story.
You bring up a great many points that I'm unsure about. But this one is really complicated as well. The empiricist position is that of public observation. Determinism is an over-simplified explanation that generalizes lawful behavior in a Newtonian (atomistic) framework. It is perfectly possible to start from there, and be close enough to intuitive truths for philosophical purposes.

But I wouldn't push it too far, because syllogisms and calculus are man's logic and not nature's. Nature is probabilistic, and operates in relations of events over varying timeframes, and certainly not as "objects" on which our intuition and Aristotelean realism is based.

This split between what's in flux and the reality we think we see, between nature and our eyes, leads to an unbreachable divide between being and deductive logic. Since philosophical deductive logic is object based, no logical system will be capable of corresponding to nature (cannot be "true"). Abstract models can correspond to each other, but can only roughly approximate nature. All abstractions are models that fit more or less, better or worse.

Even in Plato, Parmenides lays it on Socrates/Plato (in an amazing piece of devastating self-critique) that the eternal world of Forms cannot possibly have any logical connection to the sensible world, therefore it is unknowable (no warranted justification is possible)!

If there are universally shared moral elements in humans prior to our having developed a belief system/understandingthis would be so, on biological basis, and those can be reasonably and/or logically shown as necessarily following from empiricist grounds,this is a philosophical (Pythagorean) stance that nature is deductively reasonable, then we have something substantial to say about morality outside of 'ought'.this is not impossible, but does not necessarily follow, because of the divide between the empirical and the rational, In this case at least, my aim is to first show how and why the conventional conception of morality is fallacy. could be so. It becomes a matter of comparing and contrasting their conventional model against your model.

Thanks for your time here, Yada.

Your response brings to light some objections which I should be able to handle, if my argument makes sense, that is. I have always held that if one does not know the opposing side of a argument, then one does not know their own side well enough. I try to hold myself to the highest of standards. With that in mind, thank you for the critique. I will attempt to properly assess the expressed concern(s).

creativesoul wrote:

I am fairly certain that I work mostly from an empiricist/determinist position when it comes to what constitutes whether or not potential evidence is relevent and sufficient enough to warrant a conclusion. However, I am unsure if that contradicts my attempts at using reason/logic as evidence. I mean, when talking about human behavior, we have the behavior itself as objective evidence, but when talking about how one frames their own thought after experience becomes a variable, it becomes a completely different story.

Yada:

You bring up a great many points that I'm unsure about. But this one is really complicated as well. The empiricist position is that of public observation. Determinism is an over-simplified explanation that generalizes lawful behavior in a Newtonian (atomistic) framework. It is perfectly possible to start from there, and be close enough to intuitive truths for philosophical purposes.

For reasons completely unrelated to this thread, your expression here found a home... Pleasant memories. More on topic: Hopefully this response will help you to understand my position without my actually offering too many syllogisms. Currently, my focus is more upon determining what constitutes the most reliable method available to us for assessing morality. A few things upfront...

I do not believe in, nor rely upon the notion of free will. It is my opinion that the notion of free will was conceived as a means of exhonerating the God of Abraham for the existence of evil in response to Epicurus' argument. I very well may be wrong, however, I think entymology supports that conclusion. I believe that the human will is influenced by both genetic predisposition(personal tastes, mental capabilities) and external influence(individual life experience). Hypersonic, I believe, once gave an argument here several years ago that went something along these lines...

In order to choose 'better' one must first, at least know of 'better'. Free will presupposes volition.

Moving on...

Belief: that which is accepted as being true

(Empirical???) Premiss - Humans are born ignorant - completely void of belief/knowledge.

Belief is a necessary bi-product of our being innately rational creatures with an extensive memory whose aim is to survive. There are two kinds of belief, original - which is rudimentary conscious thought about experience, and adopted - which encompasses every thought expressed through a common language. A child need not understand the statement "fire hurts" to know that it does after touching it. One need not comprehend the statement "Water quenches thirst" to know that it does. We can know that we need not learn to perceive the world around us, or identify and recognize the objects of perception through conscious correlation. We also know that we need not learn to feel emotion, pleasure, or pain. We just do. That comes quite naturally without necessarily having adopted a common language.

While original belief must begin in a basic manner such as described above, after being interwoven into the adopted through common language, the two converge to become one in the same belief system. How we come understand the world around us, our emotions, as well as what may have been an original belief, follows from our learning a common language. That is how we come to terms with things. That is how we come to satisfy our inclination to seek truth through understanding. Language is necessarily learned and constitutes the beginning of adopted belief. Thought is the act of sensory perception, identification, recognition, and rational correlation between objects of perception by an individual. "Where the word breaks off, no thing may be." All thought is necessarily abstract, in that it is but a linguistic representation of reality. How closely(accurately) a premiss can be shown to correspond to reality/fact becomes it's reliability factor, the truth value, you know how the rest of an argument follows.

The universal value of truth.

Axiom - I believe 'X' means I believe 'X' is true... necessarily so.

All humans have a belief-system.
Human understanding is necessarily inferred from the belief-system.

Axiom - It is impossible to knowingly believe a falsehood.

Everyone thinks that their beliefs accurately correspond to reality.



Regarding transcendental grounds, I am not atheist. I am firmly Taoist in that regard. If words can describe it, it is not the true way. Truth is man-made and therefore malleable and dynamic with the progress of human knowledge, but it is the closest we can come to certainty.

Yada:

But I wouldn't push it too far, because syllogisms and calculus are man's logic and not nature's. Nature is probabilistic, and operates in relations of events over varying timeframes, and certainly not as "objects" on which our intuition and Aristotelean realism is based.

While I agree with the general sentiment here, I must question this position. For one, I find no good reason, nor have I ever witnessed an argument which convincingly attributes agency to nature. All logic is man's. What grounds would we have for asserting that something/anything is or is not "nature's logic"? Man is a part of nature. Logic belongs to man. Therefore, by default alone - logic is a part of nature. As is probability...

QM is probabilistic. QM is not nature. Therefore...

Aside from the problem of scale... I do not see how it logically follows that "nature is probabilistic." Using that logic, from particular to general, we could say that nature is *whatever* particularity we can envision and the argument would have equal merit, including nature is logical.

Have I misunderstood something here?

I want to address the rest, however, this part is enough for now I think.

Creative,
I'm NOT critiquing anything specific here. I am raising general issues that might be helpful in creating a theory. I'm only assuming that you'll have some premises, logic, some conclusions, and perhaps further implications. I'm not favoring any theory or even any type of theory over any other, especially since I only have the slightest passing acquaintance with moral theories.

As a relativist, I am neutral to almost an infinite number of theories. This is not to say that they are all subjective, or all the same. That would be both silly and misleading. It's that conclusions and implications of theories depend on their premises and their logic. And both of those dependencies are freely chosen by the author from whatever resources he has.

Realist theories claim to represent the one and only true reality. Antirealist theories, sometimes termed as ethical rather than moral, are more limited in scope, and represent many local domains of truths. Subjective theories refer to I and my beliefs and my actions, and are even more limited than antirealist theories.

As long as you can keep these straight, I can accept whatever your premises are. Any specific critique would only be valid if it reflected your preferred bounds: For example, critiquing Euclid because plane geometry fails on the surface of a globe is not valid, because a globe is not a plane surface. Analogously, critiquing Parmenides/Zeno or Kant on relativistic grounds is NOT valid.

Late Wittgenstein made much of word games ~ meaning is determined by the use of words in *this* game. Games in general lead to a different domain of meaning than any particular game does. Outside a particular game its key words are meaningless. Same with philosophical systems. They have domains of meaning, and they are only meaningful within their domain of meaning.