DavidOdden

The question of whether a being has rights. The answer is seemingly trivial at the moment -- "man", i.e. homo sapiens. But it isn't metaphysically guaranteed that no other rights-bearing beings exist, and at some point we may bneed to have a uniform law protecting the rights of space aliens if they are rights-bearing, but not if they are meat animals.

They pay me money to teach it, at Ohio State. (home page). Where in Texas, if you don't mind?

I almost agree. I totally agree when an instructor freely chooses the easy way out; but instructors don't always have that liberty, in which case it becomes a matter of what the instructor's highest value is. If I were coerced into such a system, I wold either have to abandon the career that I value, or swallow another load of collectivism that punishes the able. My first concern is number 1.

As Good points out, nothing has an intrinsic value. However, it might have an objective value, that is, be clearly and recognisably good for your purposes. Hence for most life forms, oxygen is necessary for life, and if you recognise that, it is an objective value. That value isn't "in the oxygen", but rather is a consequence of the nature of man. But that is a moral standard: you do want laws to be the expression of morality - just not any arbitrary morality. You want laws to reflect a specific morality (having to do with life as a human, and what's necessary for such a life). Laws against murder promote rational life; laws against Tuesday noon showers do not. (The necessary part, but not the sufficient part, qv. below). Laws should not enforce good values: they should protect rights. Thus, for instance, having a malevolent sense of life should not be a capital crime (or even a misdemeanor), but it is a bad value. There's an important distinction between when you are justified in complaining about someone's actions or attitudes, vs. when it is right to bring down the might of the law against them. Some values should enforced by law, but not all. This makes the preservation of life seem to be almost the highest possible value, and it shouldn't be. There are times when it's reasonable and good to kill an animal: in conjunction with dinner, if there are too many of them, if they harm you or your property, if they are old and sick. I'm not a recreational animal killer, but perfectly reasonable people like to go out and plink squirrels as a form of recreation (I have to admit, I consider squirrels to be a major disvalue), and I don't think that recreational hunting reflects a psychological illness. I don't see the moral value in preserving animal life; but that doesn't mean that I should kill any animal I can. To decide to kill an animal, I would need a reason. I have a blanket death warrant out for all squirrels and cockroaches, for good reason.

Welcome on both accounts. I have a general program going of trying to show that there aren't any semantic problems in Objectivism, so if you find something puzzling or (horrors) questionable, bring it out and maybe we can see if there is a real problem.

Here are three analogies. (1) There is a building in Redmond WA ostensibly owned by Microsoft. Under capitalism, who owns that building? (2) There is (presumably) some property owned by the Ayn Rand Institute. Under capitalism, who owns that property? (3) My wife and I have a deed to our house, with both our names on it. Under capitalism, who owns our house? The answers is (respectively) Microsoft Corporation, ARI, and me and my wife. Private ownership does not mean "single human", so in the last case two specific people own the house, and in the former case, Microsoft, a corporation, owns it. [i assume that's true for ARI as well, but that's just a guess]. . Correct. The opposite term ("public property") would refer to property that is owned by everybody.

Because it is more humane than throwing them on the grill alive.

See An Introduction to Logic ch. 18, by H.W.B Joseph, which is a classic treatise on logic. The Oxford English Dictionary defines induction (in the logical sense) as "The process of inferring a general law or principle from the observation of particular instances". It derives from Latin inductio, Cicero's rendering of Greek epagoge.

The proper citation for that book, given the author's self-representation of the book, is Ronald Pine (1989) Scence and the Human Prospect, Wadsworth Publishing Co: Belmont, CA. Pine is an instructor at Honolulu Community College, and the book is available online here, which you quoted from ch. 3. A quick look at the preface and the first part of the book indicates that he might be almost as confused as you, but not quite. This page is a counter to that source, which refutes his claim. So on a source-for-source basis, hs definition is neutralized. Now what you should do is look through the book, and discover what is his basis for his statement about induction. In addition, you have represented inducting many ways and some of them are egregiously wrong. Pine's definition: is no worse than the usual anti-inductivist Bayesian twaddle. You will discover that there's a reason why he doesn't support his definition with any prior citations, e.g. from Aristotle, and that is because he made up this definition himeslf.

We don't care about email you get from your professors. There is no "article by the Indiana Univesity Press". I will try to get a copy of Copi & Cohen 12th edition. If you can get a copy of the 11th edition and verify that the quotes are also there, I can do likewise. (Getting the 12th edition may take longer, apparently). Or if you would care to reveal the details of this supposed article written by Indiana University Press and if I can get a copy, we can shift attention to that.

When you provide us with your actual sources, any number of people here myself included will be very happy to explain the problem. The burden rests on you to provide those sources for inspection. We've provided sufficient evidence already that your deconstruction of the concept induction is in serious error. If you persist in making erroneous claims and continue to refuse to fully reveal your sources, then you're abandoning reason, in which case no rational interaction with you is possible. If this source of yours is objectively inspectable it is possible to explain either the source of your error, or their error. So I'm informing you that until you come clean on your source of misinformation, I find this interaction to be be and not worth any more of my time.

Indiana, he sez.

Come on, get serious. There is no such thing as "Introduction to Logic" produced by Indiana University. Indiana University does not "produce" works. Specific people of units at IU do. Does this have an actual author -- what's the name? Is this published by Indiane University Press? What is the ISBN number? Is this a handout for some class you're taking? What is the class -- what department, what specific course? Who is the instructor? What authority does he cite to support his totally erroneous notion of induction? I hereby challenge you to substantiate the implication that anyone in the world, other than you, is this confused about induction. Are you merely saying "Some drunken jackass wrote this nonsense, and they were physically located at IU when they committed this crime against the name of logic"? I believe that all of your erroneous assertions about induction have been thoroughly refuted, so all you seem to have left is evasion.

I see. Somehow, somebody gave you the wrong definition of inductive reasoning, so that would explain why you have a bad opinion of it. Some free things you can look at briefly to understand induction are this or this. Most dictionaries (cf. EC's extract from Webster's) will explain the term if you're not familiar with it, though not in great depth. Rather than obsess about the definition of induction, you should simply ask youself, how can the premises of a formal deduction be proven in the first place? The other question you should ask yourself, but seem to have to interest in answering since you've skipped over this issue even after I've brought it to your attention, is what of value do derive from the process of deduction? Your usage of "induction" is non-standard, and while it's your legal right to call a banana a jookie, I won't understand what you're saying.

That's not a valid inductive argument. You have to derive the conclusion from particulars, so for example "Fred has gotten sick", "Bill has gotten sick" (etc.) plus "No person (over the age of 3) has not gotten sick". From that you can derive the conclusion "100% of people get sick (some time in their lives)". If you know of particular people who have actually never been sick, that fact is sufficient to block the conclusion that you must get sick sometime (assuming, contrary to fact, that you haven't ever been sick). What do you mean, it "leaves room for error"? If you're saying that observing consistent correlations is not equivalent to knowledge of causality, that's correct. The essential failure of all of these formal modes of reasoning is that they don't come to proper grips with "Therefore". The formal deductive approach sees the connection as being magical: but the proper way to look at the question is in terms of causation. A proper argument (inductive or deductive) would focus on whether being human causes sickness (and it does not). You can come up with a valid argument framed in terms of causality, if you'd like. But that's false, so the rest of the argument is trash. Sound deductive arguments can't be in error, but to be sound, you have to already know the answer that you're 'arguing' to: the deduction does not provide you with any information. The truth of the premises cannot be derived deductively -- they have to be arrived at inductively. Deductive arguments "leave room for error" because the premises may be false.

Aha! As I suspected. You don't understand inductive reasoning. It even looks like you don't understand the distinction between "sound" and "valid" (I spit upon the distinction). Before you wander too far into the wilderness, would you care to explain what you consider the proper means of determining "importance" to be? Is "important" a 1-place predicate or a 2-place predicate?

Extremely serious. For starters, I have no idea what you mean by the "value" of a variable. Just to make sure this doesn't go way off the rails, I'll assume you mean specifically "referent". Now then, what is the referent of "y", or of "a", or "y"? Even if I put it in context, for instance "P(x,y)" or "Q(j,k)", you can't tell me the referent of x, y, j or k. In Latin, this is referred to as argumentum ad vericundam. Are you serious? You're telling me that you think you understand the referent of "y" or "x" better than you understand the referent of "cow" or "Earth"? Pardon me while I snooze though this part a bit. I've done enough deductive proofs in my life to know why they aren't any use to understanding man's method of reasoning. If you'd like to retract your suggestion and make an alternative proposal about a mathematics section, please feel free. I take it that you consider mathematics to be the only important form of knowledge? Your implicit argument -- "Mathematical methods are essential to understanding the universe; mathematical methods cannot be discovered by any means other than symbolic deduction; therefore symbolic deduction is the most inportant method of gaining knowledge" does not go through, for more than one reason. If that isn't your argument, you can say what your argument really is. If so, tell me what does "b" represent, and what does "x" stand for? I assume that you're not familiar with Rand's discussion of the conventional nature of names, i.e. it doesn't matter how you pronounce the name of the concept <banana>, from ITOE. Pronunciation is not at issue: what is at issue is that "b" can stand for cow, horse, electron, pink elephant, knife, legislation, containment or anything else that exists. Variables don't have fixed values. Variables are bad, for serious discussion, because they don't have fixed value, and therefore con't refer to anything in particular. The only way to narrow down what you're talking about is to delimit the referent of "y" with... words. Now let me offer a ray of hope. So-called "deductive logic" is typically understood to be FOP logic like they teach in university-level Logic 101: that's the stuff I'm talking about, which spends too much time going essentially nowhere. Inductive logic is formalizable, and from a syntactic POV is as "deductive" as basic 101 Logic. Real logic is not pure deduction (i.e. question-begging).

I think that would be a really bad idea. Offhand, I can't think of anything of value that you can derive from deductive logic and the replacement of words that refer to concrete concepts with the ultimate floating abstraction, the capital letter variable (standing for arbireary predicates) and the lower case variable (usually restricted to the letters i, j, k, x, y and z). If you know of some case where some good might come from such an exercise, perhaps you could bring it out. I do think that some discussion of logic (not just "deductive logic") is quite appropriate, but there's an area for Epistemology topics already.

The thing that irritated me about that law was that the underlying idea was perfectly valid, but the implementation was completely wrong. This is a matter between me and my phone company, and doesn't properly involve the government.

Offhand, it seems to imply that you value your own time more than the time and programming skills of idiots. This is a good thing. Also, yes. In either case, you have no relationship with the seller of the product, who has a relationship with the TV station or web-page provider. Coke pays CBS money to stick adds into the middle of the news, knowing that some people will decide to not watch the commercials. If you look carefully at the fineprint in your agreement with Tivo or Time Warner (if you have DVR/Cable), they never require you to watch the commercials. Eventually, I imagine, commercial skipping will become common enough that standard advertising on TV will not be profitable. But they can insert advertising into the "content", just as they did in the old days. And if you don't like advertising at all, you can always pay for the more expensive channels like HBO.

If that was addressed to me and my suggestion of eliminating the clergy, obviously not. If I had said "liquidate" or "eviscerate", you could conclude that. In an oppressive theocracy where clergy are responsible for the murder and imprisonment of innocent people, those who need to be liquidated will turn out to be, overwhelmingly, clergy: but this is not a biconditional. It's not the fact of being clergy, but rather the fact of being a murder, that earns you the strong moral condemnation. In this case, because of the theology involved, there is also a causal relationship between the religious views and the actions, but because man is volitional, you have a choice of not being a murderer even tough you are a Shiite cleric.

Not just live, but live qua man -- by reason. What I'm trying to force you into is saying (and seeing) where reason leaves the scene. You have to show me that survival qua man is not possible, and I've explained to you why I think you're wrong. You might do better if you made this a "trapped in an undersea cave with no air, and 1 hour of oxygen between you", where the realities are more clear-cut. Everybody dies. If survival by reason is possible, then moral issues are relevant. The right to property is not the highest rational value for man: rather, it is something necessary for man to survive by reason. If survival by reason is simply impossible, then property rights are irrelevant, and morality falls by the wayside. But as I've pointed out, at some point you did have a free choice, which needs to be evaluated. So for example if you chose to leave behind the standard 3-week survival ration pack in the fighter so that you could cart along a television set, in case you get bored -- that decision deserves to be evaluated morally.

Why did this guy chose to get in a fighter jet with a blind, crippled legless orphan? Why did he do so without packing any survival provisions? Can we drop the orphan assumption, and make this other person be a healthy and capable adult (whose parents are both alive)? Is he with his wife? His worst enemy? A murderer? What value is the other person to him? Why did he decide to go without any food except for a rotting lump of bread? What about water? Who owns the food? Why doesn't one of these people stay put and the other take the food and go for help? The person who walks out of the desert potentially has a greater physical need for food to survive the trip out: this suggests a "nobody dies" scenario. How exact is their knowledge of their nutritional requirements? There is one right answer for a given scenario, but no two scenarios are exactly the same. We want... information.

You should eat the orphan. Seriously, this is a non-existent scenario. You should pick a third option, where you don't die and you don't take away the bread from the poor, dying blind, quadruplegic retarded torture victim orphan with burns over 90% or her body (if you're going to play the emotional appeal card, you might as well use the trump card). So get up off the floor, leave that crackhouse, go down to the local Quikimart where they're hiring night clerks, and buy yourself a nice juicy steak. Or rotting pile of bean curd, if that's your preference. Out of basic compassion for that poor lump of human refuse, you could even bring her a side of fries. In other words, this is a false dichotomy. You made some choice earlier to get in this situation. What was that choice?

No. The problem is not that the pro-democracy forces lacks arms, but that they don't know the names of the state police agents who will kill them for opposing the government. Turns out your neighbor is a VEVAK agent, and you get carted off to prison or simply killed, so don't talk to your neighbor. Either of them, because you don't know which one is an agent. The most useful thing that the US could do (if it could do it) would be making known the names and addresses of all of the secret police. Eliminating the clergy would be the second most useful thing.