DavidOdden

I'm familiar with that usage. We can can find very many such examples out there, indeed we can say that the writings of Ayn Rand are implicit in the grammar of English, and the writings of Immanuel Kant are implicit in the grammar of English. “…all arithmetic and all geometry are in us virtually, so that we can find them there if we consider attentively and set in order what we already have in the mind,” “Thus it is that ideas and truths are for us innate, as inclinations, dispositions, habits, or natural potentialities, and not as actions; although these potentialities are always accompanied by some actions, often insensible, which correspond to them” (Leibniz New Essays). The problem is that I find this to be an abuse of the meaning of "implicit", one that we find very common in social contract style ethical discussions which invoke the notion of "implied consent". Rather than say that all knowledge is implicit in the faculty of reason, we should say that all knowledge is created by using the faculty of reason. We can likewise arrive at valid concepts by contemplating the import of walking into walls for the concept of “solidity”. It is not valid to say that the concept of existence exclusively derives from sense perception: obviously, there is more to conceptualization that simple sense perception. Invoking the implicit obscures an important question: how exactly does one create or validate a concept? Stating the logical hierarchy is not the same as explaining the epistemological process of invention / discovery.

My point is that what you are talking about isn’t knowledge, it is potential knowledge. You might say that some people have that knowledge and others should get their act together to actually have it, and pursuing philosophical discussions here is one way to gain such knowledge. The central question in this thread is about knowledge (not metaphysics), and specifically about validating knowledge. I’m not objecting to your mode of expression, I’m objecting to what seems to be your idea, that people have “implicit knowledge”, knowledge that is not chosen. As I noted, knowledge of personal experience via senses is automatic (indeed, axiomatic), but conceptual knowledge is not automatic. Applied to abstract concept like “entity” or “existence”, you cannot automatically know these concepts. But you can discover them by applying reason to the axiomatic, such as the sensation of bumping into a door jam. Can discover, potentially, if you choose to. Until you do, you do not have a concept “existence”, you just have sensory knowledge that you heard a word “existence”. Before getting to the proper concept of “existence”, you might mistakenly think that delusions, contradictions and God do not exist. They do, as mental states, not a real things. Mental things exist, a fact that eludes many people. Which is why discussion of bare existence without including discussion of identity is a shortcut to intellectual hell.

“Implicit knowledge” is a form of mysticism, based on a premise of a magical automatic reason machine in the human mind. Only a very small amount of one’s knowledge is automatic, namely if you sense something, you have that concrete perceptual knowledge of an event for instance that you cut yourself or that the phone rang. You do not automatically gain high level conceptual knowledge explaining the causal relationship between the sharp object slicing your skin and the sensation that follows, even though that knowledge is “implicit” in cutting yourself. Knowledge must be chosen, it is not handed to you by a brain homunculus. One of the small set of things that are legitimate automatic knowledge – things that you sense and that you register the fact of sensing – is basic words in your language. All people who speak English know that there is a word pronounced “person” because they have experienced it. Most people do not know that there is a word pronounced “zymurgy” because they have never experienced it. Most people probably know that there exists a word pronounced “existence”, and most people likely have an arbitrary incorrect definition of the word. Having a concept means having the unification of units subsumed under the label “person” or “existence”. One has the potential to explicitly validate the concept of existence through experience, but the potential and the actual are not the same. If you haven’t validated the concept, the concept isn’t validated. There may be some confusion over the proper limits on "implicit" knowledge, which relates to a person supplying actual knowledge that is not explicitly stated. If I tell you that you can use my hammer, I probably don't explicitly say that you have to return it in a short time, than you cannot destroy it, that you cannot hit me with it – these are implicit facts about what I say or would have said. This is what "context" is about. You don't have to explicitly state everything when you are communicating with someone, you don't have to announce your definition of "hammer", and so on. You may assume that your interlocutor shares with you a concept of "existence", or "rights", but as we know, the number of people who correctly grasp the concepts of "rights" is way smaller than the set of people who wield the word.

I am trying to figure out how to restate what you don’t know (and therefore are asking about) in terms that I can understand. I presume that you are stuck on validating a claim, and the fact that all knowledge derives from application of reason to perception. I also presume that you understand and accept the hierarchical nature of knowledge, for example you cannot grasp “existence” if you do not grasp “exist”. Even “exist” is far from a first-level concept. It is more productive to focus on lower-level concepts like “perceive”. For example, how do you validate the concept “dog”, and how do you validate the concept “cat”, likewise “table”, “chair”, “animal” and “furniture”? On the assumption that you can do this, then you can set to validating some much more abstract concepts like “entity”, “attribute”, “action”. My initial six examples are all examples of “entity” and not “action” or “attribute”. Eventually, we will get to the point of conceptualizing other intangible abstractions like “delusion”, “deception”, “truth”. How do you validate these concepts? The final product of this process is that you can validate the concept “universe”, which is another name for “existence”. I strongly disagree with the claim that every sane adult has an explicit concept of existence – this is kind of a “true Scotsman” fallacy. You are not insane if you don’t have an actual concept “existence”, you’re just (___ fill in the blank: lazy? lax in your thinking? focused on things other than philosophy?). Most people do not have an explicit concept of existence, they simply know the word (if they are fluent English speakers), but there are thousands of words that people commonly know without knowing the true meaning of the word. If instead you focus on “exist”, most English speakers have some defined concept “exist”, but their definition is usually wrong (typically, only real entities are thought to “exist”). I also reject the notion of “implicit acceptance” as a contradiction in terms – it’s like Peikoff’s parrot squawking sounds that resemble an English sentence, but which is not an instance of “truth”.

By pointing out that any attempt to deny existence does presuppose existence. Everything in your question already accept existence. Your questions are not about existence, they are about some more advanced question of scientific method that not only assumes existence, it assumes identity and consciousness. We do not attempt to “derive” existence, existence simply is. We do attempt to understand the identity of things that exist. The concept “existence” is a high level concept, which at least some humans have, though we can have a tangential discussion of “implicit concepts” (which I am skeptical about) if you think all humans have this concept. Dogs don’t have concepts. Infants also have not developed the concept “existence”, instead they are developing their first-level concepts like “food”, “person”, “diaper” and so on. Like all concepts, the concepts are not “in” sense perception, they derive from sense perception, which is where we get primary concepts like “food”, “person”, “diaper”. Eventually we develop a hierarchical network of concepts with fruits, vegetables, meat, milk, yogurt, ice cream, ice cream cones, banana split and so forth. Most people are deluded into believing in a “multiverse”, whereas the universe is all that exists so whatever “universe 37” is, it is just an aspect of the universe. People usually don’t understand “existence”.

Plainly, this forum has degenerated to the point that intellectual honesty is no longer a value

Sorry, I thought you were speaking of a hypothetical case and you were asking about recording error. You said they were “his private records”. Give me a link to the actual pipe case, I’ll see if I can sort out any difference.

As you describe it, the pipe dude has nothing to worry about. The law requires that the false entry be made with intent to defraud. A person cannot be convicted for making a mistake. The prosecution would not only have to prove that defendant actually entered false information (respondeat superior does not make the boss guilty of crimes committed by employees), but also that his intent was to defraud. Furthermore, since you stipulate that the records are private records, they are not covered by the law – only business records are covered. In Trump's case, the prosecution has to prove specific intent, though the jury might accept the flimsiest of evidence on that point.

Producing things of objective value is unconditionally a virtue. Not everything created is an objective value (example: Das Kapital; Mein Kampf). Keeping with the context of Trump as our Supreme Leader, it is irrelevant whether he produces value in real estate, since the job of POTUS is to execute the laws of the United States, not to manipulate the economy or make a profit off of real estate deals. Applying the relevant criteria, Trump is an anti-virtue, as president.

Not that Trump, I’m referring to the once and future president. Trump in office, as wielder of the executive power. I could care less about his real estate operation.

It goes way beyond ‘interesting’, it enters the territory of morally imperative. There is a plain contradiction in Oliver’s position. The media (NYT) bears a responsibility for turning this personal discussion into a propaganda event, it then has carries that responsibility to defend the oppressed in the present case. (*Crickets*). Of course, that presumes that the purpose of the media is to objectively report facts rather than advocate a particular ideology. Occasionally, a rational commentator will notice one of these contradictions and will write about it, as Schwartz did. What should be said is that the NYT has a responsibility to put this very question to Oliver – unsympathetically, in the same manner that they address others whom they deem to be politically incorrect. Attention needs to be put on the media for its reporting bias. However, to be effective such attention would need to be itself objective. This then reminds me of a recent Gus blog where Gus interjects a comment that “Trump’s Supreme Court appointments eventually overturned Roe vs. Wade”, which is misleading (he appointed only 3 of the majority justices, and that statement carries the false and unsupported implication that this was Trump’s reason for those appointments). It’s fine to pick on Trump, but let’s see some actual facts, not just mystical divination about the mental state of voters and guilt-by-association reasoning. Now, hitting rather close to home, there has been a chorus of crickets over the fact that the Trump faction in the House at least temporarily limited some of the right-trampling power of the FISA courts. This action was taken with the full approval of Trump, and yet where is the laudatory commentary? So yeah, we can understand this in terms of a hierarchy of values. Truth is a value; but Trump is a greater disvalue; ignoring a relevant truth is less evil than making an false assertion or implication. Some media elevate the ‘Trump is evil’ axiom to the point that they will make literally-false statements, but that is not so common because of defamation law (though certain media are statutorily immunized against such actions). A safer bet is to rely on false implications (which can still be a cause of legal action, just easier to summarily dismiss). When silence is available, that is a completely un-actionable method of promulgating the viewpoint that Trump is evil. To be clear, Trump is evil, my point is that the philosopher’s job is focus on the logical infrastructure of political discourse, and to point out these contradictions. We cannot in all honesty demand adherence to logic if we also repudiate logic. The laughing-face emoticon is an exemplar of an intellectually dishonest tool, which should be obliterated from this forum.

A further question should have been addressed. Which is worse, mandating display of the Ten Commandments in public schools, or public schools? I say the greater evil is public schools, not the Ten Commandments. The particular law is limited to governmental schools including schools receiving funding by the state, and therefore does not impose any religious requirements on purely private schools. In the original bill, there was a simple commandment to display the document which was only directed at public schools. I surmise that there was some discussion of whether this law would pass higher judicial review, which resulted in two economic hooks, the expansion where it includes schools receiving state funds, and the limitation that no school is compelled to spend its funds to purchase a display. I believe that the economic burden argument would have ultimately doomed the earlier version in the courts, whereas the current law encourages the good citizens of Louisiana to donate displays, in case some school has in mind using the economic burden as a justification for non-compliance. In comparing evils, it is hard to choose between Hitler, Stalin or Mao, but seemingly easy to choose between any or all of those three vs. Kant (did Kant actually kill anyone?). Yet I would deem Kant to be the greater evil, in that the harm caused by his philosophy includes all of the above mass murderers, plus public schools. Public schools are likewise a broader and less-obvious evil compared to allowing or requiring expressions of religion in “public spaces”. To effectively argue against such a law, you have to address and overcome the First Amendment rights of The Religious (which are abridged by prohibiting religious expressions in public spaces). The expressive rights of the many cannot be be sacrificed for the sake of the contrary expressive rights of the few (very few in Louisiana). Appeal to separation of church and state is a cheap and weak argument though probably the only one that stands a chance w.r.t. judicial review. The proper moral argument is, simply, directed at the evil concept of public schools. I see tadmjones made this identification also, while I was laboring over my screed.

I suppose the article does an adequate job of addressing the standard political complaints about jobs in relation to imports (though I don’t accept the claim that “Manufacturing output in the U.S. is near its all-time high. We make more than Japan, Germany, India, and South Korea combined” on the simple grounds that this is a factual claim which deserves actual numbers and sources rather than an unsupported assertion – but facts apparently get in the way of reasoning). One issue which does indeed figure into Objectivist reasoning on this topic is the question, what is the proper response to initiation of force? Governmental force can be justified as a response to the initiation of force, therefore if the government of China initiates force against its citizens to compel labor or to subsidize manufacturing (etc.), it is not immoral for the US to retaliate by restricting the aggressors from profiting from their violations of rights. We have no duty to retaliate when the force is not directed against us, but it is morally allowed. Not all international trade is voluntary, a proper analysis of the issue has to include whether or not some nation operates on free market principles, or does it use slave labor and government subsidy to allow their goods to better compete against goods traded under free market principles? Of course, there are no nations operating under free market principles – our goods are at a disadvantage because of price inflation resulting from government regulation including minimum wage laws. Our own government puts American goods at a disadvantage because it initiates force in order to create a supposed social benefit. Even though all goods are tainted with the stain of force, we cannot therefore forbid all trade (hopefully this is not a controversial proposition). On the opposite side of the continuum, is it ever proper to limit trade in goods created by initiation of force? A kind of case that should be obvious is that it is proper to restrict trafficking in stolen goods, e.g. I cannot break into a warehouse, take goods, then sell them at a discount. But what about the case where the vendor did not himself steal the goods, instead, the government confiscated the goods and gave them to a vendor, who then sold them at a discount? At the level of theory, all we can say is that initiation of force is improper. At the level of practical law, it is far from clear what degree of initiation of force can be ignored, when it comes to the governments (proper) function of protecting rights. A simple principle that could be applied is that it is proper for the US government to protect the rights of US citizens, and only US citizens. I am referring to the sketchy realm of the morally optional, when it comes to government action.

Indeed, because of the First Amendment, the only realistic path to a hate speech law would be a political change where Kamala Harris and those like her hold the reins of power and appoint a majority of SJW justices who are able to devise a new interpretation of The Constitution where prior case law on hate speech is swept away, analogous to the reset of the right of privacy obliterated by Dobbs. That took a half-century and clearly it could not happen any time soon. Of course, a new constitutional amendment could create an exception, but the US is nearly unique in how difficult it is to amend our constitution. A close runner-up w.r.t. hate speech laws is Norway, which has a little-enforced law against hate speech. I was surprisd to learn that Estonia actually has no law against hate speech, and they are is being “prosecuted” by the EU for not enacting an anti hate-speech law. In Estonia, it would take a mere act of parliament to sweep away that exception.

Knowing the existence of, and disregard for, noise is the fundamental achievement of Galilean science. “Noise” is essentially the epistemological filter that stands between God and man, necessary when dealing with vast amounts of unknown such as molecules in a gas. Only God can do the computation with infinite precision. Man can handle smaller amounts of data in circumstances where we know the relevant data, which we don’t always, cf. Neptune and Pluto. The classic perspective is that the laws of physics are absolute, and not statistical approximations ± some degree of randomness, although more-practical laws dealing with large-scale structures such as the ideal gas law are approximations. Not because the universe is inherently “non-deterministic”, but because it’s impractical to construct a particle-physics level model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment. Non-determinism was classically an epistemological problem, not a metaphysical one. Things changed with Heisenberg’s argument that God plays with dice. I never really understood the leap of reasoning from “we can’t predict” to “there is no law”, until I thought about what physical laws are. It is generally held that the laws of physics are a fundamental aspect of the universe, that they are real and not just human conveniences. Objectivism interjects an important distinction between epistemology and metaphysics, saying that there is Existence, and has a definite nature independent of consciousness. A grasp of Existence – by a consciousness – gives rise to “fact”, a perceivable aspect of Existence. There is a commonplace observation in anthropology that classification of existents into natural types is seemingly random cultural influences. As English-speaking westerners we feel that our concept “snake” is absolutely correct, there really is a universal snakeness to snakes which we perceive. But other cultures and languages have different principles of classification, where a certain animal is also “a type of snake”, e.g. Ophisaurus which are not taxonomically snakes, but in many cultures are lumped together with snakes; or certain species of Typhlops which are snakes but in some cultures are classified as worms. The cultural aspect that yields these differences of classification is focus. Standard Western classification focuses on evolution of species, but local folk taxonomies focus on immediately-perceivable morphological similarity or utility. The “laws of nature” are epistemological by nature, in that they grasp the nature of existence. The error that arises in discussions of ‘determinism’ is not being clear on what ‘determinism’ is. Determinism, properly understood, is a claim not about existence, it is a claim about Man, that we have the capacity to fully grasp every fact. I’m not opposed to that premise, I just think that it is important to say more precisely what “determinism” is. Non-determinism refers to aspects of existence which we cannot know. Of course, the other half of the discussion is being clearer about what “free will” is.