I am a huge lover of philosophy, especially in Epistemology, or studying how we know things. I wanted to start a topic all about philosophical debates, because I didn't see one here. The first thing I want to talk about is how we know things, and the view that I most agree with is pragmatism. Before modern philosophy, Pluto's philosophy of the theory of forms, where everything on Earth was an example of a universal concept of that idea. For example, every chair on Earth is an example of a pure "chairness" that was in a second universe of universals. Plato also argued that knowledge is justified true belief, which take a long time to explain, so I will save that one for later. But then comes Richard Rorty. In an essay, he writes about seventeen. Seventeen, in Plato's theory must have some kind of seventeenness, but what is seventeenness? he writes. The truth is that you can't have seventeen without sixteen and eighteen. Just like everything on Earth. We know things because of their relationships with other things, and it's all interconnected in this web of knowledge. This is pragmatism. For example, we know what water is because it's clear, liquid, made of Oxygen and Hydrogen, and we drink it. There was not a description in there that didn't involve something other than water. What does AG think?
Only statements can be said to be true or false. And all statements are either true or false. This is known as the Law of Excluded Middle: p v ~p There are some logical systems that deny this law, thus generating contradictions. Sometimes these systems are capable of handling counterfactuals. Which brings me to me next point: the term 'logic', as has already been pointed out, is being misused. Especially in a thread on philosophy, logic has a very specific meaning. You may mean different people have different methods of thinking about things. But that's not logic. You should be clear on whether you mean some sort of internal relation to the world, some method of justification, or something else.
As for an object that stands in relation to nothing else, we have a concept for this already. Imagine a universe in which there exists only one object. You can ask a lot of different questions about what this world is like and how we refer to things.
There was not a description in there that didn't involve something other than water.
I ask you my friend. How did we learn of that first? It could not have been called clear, if there were not something opaque. The same way we call everything deriven from base molecules is the simple reason we don't state it. You described water in a simple way, however it's involvement with everything has just expanded so much more.
Also, the "chairness" in other universes I am unsure I understand you. xD
I just thought I'd bring up an objection to Pragmatism, since that's what seems to have gotten this subject going. There are many different flavors of pragmatism. One particularly famous maxim is the notion that the sense of a proposition can be understand by the practical effect it would have on us if it were true, versus if it were false. So, "the grass is green" is a meaningful sentence because we can imagine real difference between worlds where this statement is true and worlds where this statement is false. But a statement like "I'm a brain in a vat" are, according to the pragmatist, senseless. It's part of the skeptic's assumption that the actual world and the BIV world are indistinguishable. Whichever world we are in would, ex hypothesi, be no different from its twin. This means there are no practical inferences we could make from this statement that would be of any value. Now, most epistemologists find this response unsatisfactory. After all, it does seem to make a real difference which world we're in - even if we can't tell.
But there's a deeper worry - why should I accept pragmatism at all? What is the motivation for me to accept it? If a sentence is meaningless just because you say so, then it all becomes a bit arbitrary. One popular way of thinking about this is to thing about pragmatism as the notion that what is true is what is expedient to believe. But then we could ask if pragmatism itself is true. it should be fairly easy to see that this initiates an infinite regress. It's also worth noting that this regress is problematic because it's infinite, but also because it increases in complexity with each instantiation.
So either pragmatism is an arbitrary assessment lacking proper motivation, or it generates regresses, which is reason enough to reject it outright.
Only statements can be said to be true or false. And all statements are either true or false. This is known as the Law of Excluded Middle: p v ~p There are some logical systems that deny this law, thus generating contradictions. Sometimes these systems are capable of handling counterfactuals.
How about making a statement about an indeterminate quantum state?
Seems that I could predicate of something that it is indeterminate. Thus, the proposition, "Quantum state S is indeterminate" could be a true proposition. You could make the case that this proposition isn't one that can have a truth value. Statements like "Ken thinks that such and such is the case" are like this. We can also say whether or not "The probability that P is .76" is true or not.
