Mr. Enthymeme

When we look at a pencil appearing bent in water, our "model" says the pencil is straight. I think you're implying that our sense say that the pencil is bent. I think this is the sense -- at a simple level -- in which you imply the models are contradictory to the senses. Not exactly. The examples I gave from cosmology were more to the point. Newtonian physics claims that there’s an invisible force (at variance with the senses) stretching out from the center of point masses (also at variance with the senses). It also claimed, contrary to all earthly experiments and experience in his day, that an object, if nudged, will continue in motion in a straight line forever unless nudged again. He was right about the last but boy! was it ever a LUCKY GUESS! He had zero evidence for it. He assumed it was true in contradiction to all observation. Furthermore, prior to Newton, Galileo made a surprising assertion. He claimed that entities had two classes of properties: primary qualities and secondary qualities. The primary qualities were things like weight and spatial extension; the secondary, things like color, texture, smell, etc. He claimed that the secondary qualities are not really qualities of the thing itself but are in the human mind. This was a wholly new way of approaching the study of phenomena, and one which was very much at variance with observation. Color, for example, clearly appears to be a property of a thing. He was quite right about color: whatever the correlation with frequency, “blue” qua “blue” is a subjective experience that exists only within the mind. He was wrong, however, about weight. Newton taught us to think differently about what we normally experience as weight. He taught us to think about weight as the interaction of an invisible force (never perceived or experienced before) called “gravity” (a word that he used metaphorically, since in his day “gravitas” did not mean literally what Newton intended it to mean) and an invisible property of an object called “mass” (also never perceived or experienced before). That’s more of what I had in mind. As for the disjointed spoon, the experience of feeling the spoon while it was half submerged could pretty much teach even the most naïve savage that his eyes should not be trusted in this matter. As for the argument that the senses “do not lie, they merely give the full context of the data” no one said anything about lying. The issue (in the case of the spoon example) is whether sight can be relied upon or trusted irrespective of whether it is telling you a lie or the truth. That the eyes “tell the truth” is not enough reason to trust them. If you meet a classy babe at a bar and ask for her name and number and for a reply she merely hands you a telephone directory, we could say that she is not lying; she is giving you the "full context of the information" needed to get her name and number. But what good is it? None. Telephone directories are not to be trusted (neither are classy babes at bars). However, the fact is that they are not contradictory. Our senses sense what they sense correctly: it is not an illusion. They sense something very real. Senses, however, do not provide knowledge. In other words, the senses do not tell us whether the pencil is bent or straight in the first place, not in any truly valid way. There is no variance at all; the model "interprets" what we sense. A consistent model does so without contradiction. As far as "the mind influences perception", what of it? Did anybody say that the human mind is infallible? Let's simply take for granted that human beings can make mistakes: See my above example of Newton and Galileo. I’m not speaking of hallucinations. I’m claiming that by the time a percept reaches the brain for further processing, it has already undergone lots of thinking – non-conscious thinking. they can misinterpret their senses, and they can be influenced by all sorts of things. So what of it? It does not follow that seeking knowledge is in vain. It does not follow that knowledge is unattainable. Even if we will always probably be making some mistakes, it does not imply that everything we know is a big mistake. Never claimed that. I don't see what all this has to do with God though. Well, we were talking about proving a negative. That took us from grammar to propositional logic to philosophy of science to history of science to cosmology. I agree that we could use a bit of a course correction here.

Interesting. I'd like to take a look at your work. What are some of your publications? Sure. But since you appear to be incapable of understanding a simple post on a message board, I don’t expect that you’ll be able to understand a higher level article (and one with so many pages!) in an anthology of articles on grammar and linguistics. Besides, I hate to see you spend your hard-earned money on yet another book that you won’t read. I see, so does that mean that when you said "from the standpoint of propositional logic, it makes no difference how we phrase something grammatically", you were lying, you hadn't thought about what you wrote, you made an error -- or have we learned that 'no difference' means 'some difference'? Just curious. No. It just means that when writing for twits, I normally don’t see the need to dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s. Obviously, you’re a high-functioning, fastidious twit, so I shall certainly keep that in mind. Yup, those are other examples -- sorry that I mistook you for a foreigner. Quite all right. I pegged you for a native-speaking Objectivist right away. It's not unusual for high-functioning non-native speakers of English to be mistaken about the kinds of complementizers a verb takes, and since prove, clarify etc do take that-complements, it's not an unusual form of rationalism for them to make the error of analogizing disprove, obscure and think that then take that-clauses rather than NP-that clauses. Well, lookie that! You talk the talk! Almost as if you're an academic linguist! Unfortunately for you and your non-argument, grammatical is as grammatical does. Since people in fact use “that complements” with both “prove” and “disprove” (as well as with "like" and "dislike") that, by definition, makes the construction grammatical. Never heard “obscure” used that way, though. Would you source that for me? Thanks! Perhaps, but ungrammatical is ungrammatical. True. And legalistic is legalistic. Now that you’ve established yet again that A is A, and I’ve established yet again that no solecism has occurred, what, pray tell, is your point, and what, except your arbitrary whim, establishes that a solecism has occurred? Legally speaking, it is also wrong. I knew there was an assertion somewhere in your argument! You grant that supposed god is everywhere all at once (ominipresent, ubiquitous) So far, so good. but then deny that this means "without limit". Splendid. Your argument is based on the trivial straw argument that "everywhere" doesn't mean "without limit". I admire your question-begging; please count me as one of your warmest detractors. Whether or not the undisputed FACT that “everywhere” does not mean “without limit” is trivial is what’s at issue. Since you admit that “everywhere” does not mean “without limit”, I think any intellectually honest person would find that to be relevant – especially since Seeker’s claim of self-contradiction turns on it. That would be relevant if he had claimed that everywhere means without limit, but I don't find that claim anywhere except in your argument. (Ahem) “By contrast, the JudeoChristian god is supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, and everywhere all at once, i.e. is without limit…” [posted by Seeker] Try reading the post. Being everywhere means being everywhere without limit. That is what everywhere means -- no limits on the where. Not so. It means no limits on the “every.” I suggest you do the unthinkable: get a dictionary and look the word up. There’s no mention of “without limit.” Your next argument also falls apart but might be resurrected by a bit of leglism on your part -- "Gravity is ubiquitous and has an identity". Gravity depends on entities, Gravity depends on space. Whether or not gravity exists apart from matter has yet to be proven. Gravity waves have been detected and String Theory makes use of gravity quanta. since it is a relationship between two things. Gravity is not an independent entity. This is true only in Objectivist textbooks on physics (and we all know what bestsellers they are). I don’t know of any working, publishing physicist who has made that claim. You don’t mind sourcing that, do you? Thanks! Outside of the imaginary bounding box that encloses all entities in the universe, I’m glad that lack of factual knowledge doesn’t restrain you from making breezy generalizations. I’m fascinated with your certainty about things for which you have zero evidence. An “imaginary” bounding box? Do tell us how you know it’s imaginary? there are no entities (that should be self-evident), and therefore no gravitational force. Thus the extent of the gravitational forms is finite and limited (Applause! Encore! Bravo! Bis! Bis!) This reminds me of arguments from knee-jerk Darwinian evolutionists about the putative “proto-life” forms that “surely must have existed” in some “warm little pond” billions of years ago. Whether billions of years ago on Earth, or billions of light-years away from Earth, I guess anything goes – any “just so” story will do – if one isn’t constrained by facts and is merely interested in ways to prop up a philosophy. In case you were wondering, I enjoyed your little story very much. Your claim that modern physics dismisses sensory evidence as either irrelevant or at best misleading is false, unsupported, irrelevant and at best misleading. It is well known that physicists depend each day on sensory evidence to support their conjectures about the universe. Modern physics does not, as you wrongly assert, intentionally construct models at variance with sensory evidence, in fact that is a scientifically meaningless claim -- a scientific model can't be at variance with a fact. Then you have a quaint naïve-realist view of scientific models. Nothing wrong with that except that such a view was dropped in the 19th century and we are now in the 21st. As I’ve already explained in an earlier post, scientific models are constructed all the time at variance with observed fact. In fact, that’s the essence of most scientific models (the interesting ones, at any rate). It is not true that a Karl Popper wrote that science proceeds by proving that certain phenomena that the current hypothesis lead you to expect to occur cannot occur. He says so, both in Logic of Scientific Discovery and Conjectures and Refutations. You haven’t read enough Popper. (You’ve probably only read some sort of summary of his ideas written by various Objectivists – no wonder you’re wrong.) In fact, you might read it again and see that this is close to the opposite of what he claims. Sure. I have his books right in front of me. Why don’t you tell me which book, specifically, to “read again.” (Chapter titles would be helpful, too, since you appear extremely well acquainted with his work.) His position is that one can only proved a specific instantiation to be false, so if your model predicts a certain particle at a certain time and place, and the particle is not observed, then the prediction is false. Popperian epistemology hold that one can only know that a singular statement is true or false, and it would be forbidden metaphysics to conclude that a phenomenon cannot occur. Of course he is wrong, but that's another matter. Alas, that isn’t what he says, and he rarely mentions metaphysics. He makes the perfectly legitimate claim that we can never prove that “All X is Y” from individual experiments. There is, in fact, no such thing as inductive logic; only deductive. (Older logicians, such as Richard Whately, viewed induction as a species of argument-from-analogy and properly placed it in the field of rhetoric, not logic. I have Whately’s treatises on logic and rhetoric, too, so you are certainly welcome to tell me which chapter to “read again” to prove that I’m wrong.) Popper claims that we can hypothesize that “All X is Y” because – as you have already shown us in your arguments above – there’s no limit to what we can imagine and fantasize about; and we can then test this hypothesis by means of experiments that attempt to refute it. We only need to find a single instance in which X is not Y to question, amend, or discard the hypothesis. Furthermore, he claims that knowledge progresses when new models not only make predictions of phenomena otherwise unknown to the earlier model, but also when they demonstrate that certain phenomena predicted by the older model (predicted but not yet observed) will NOT occur. Falsification is thus the gravamen of demarcation, dividing “scientific truths” from “non-scientific truths.” This in no way invalidates those other truths; it means simply that they are not derived scientifically (in contradistinction to Popper’s early colleagues from the Vienna Circle who believed that truths were either scientific or they simply were not truths at all). Of course, Popper is correct, but that’s another matter for another forum.

Wrong. Right. Having no use for something is not the same as considering it misleading. The senses are of use within their boundaries of accuracy. You fail to grasp my meaning. I’ve never said that physicists declare our senses to be of no use (they’ve never claimed that to my knowledge). Since Galileo, physics has constructed a model of phenomena intentionally at variance with sensory evidence, not in accord with it; and this is as true of macroscopic phenomena as it is of microscopic. What we directly experience is something called "weight" (gravitas), not an invisible force interacting with an invisible property of matter dubbed "mass." What we actually observe are planets swirling around the sun; what Newton tells us is really going on is an invisible universal force acting on geometrically infinitesimal "point masses". No one has ever seen or experienced a point mass, and no one has ever experienced an invisible "force" called gravity. People have been falling off of high places since Day One and no one ever thought of the experience as submitting to a "force" in the sense of gravity being an active agent. That's because it wasn't observed to be such a thing at all. That was all invented by Newton, who taught us to think of the experience a certain way. You misunderstand the senses. The senses do not lie. They are particles and molecules interacting. If we misunderstand what they are telling us, however, we will be deceived. You misunderstand the mind. The mind does not passively receive and integrate data provided by the senses but actively influences perception. Thinking is already mixed with perception which then becomes the material for further thinking. Some might go so far as to say that thinking determines the original perception. They might be right. LOL! Yes, well that IS one way of arguing...a way that is popular with many atheists. And? And that’s the reason so many atheists fail at persuading anyone except other atheists who scarcely need persuading. Though if it makes an atheist feel better merely to dismiss arguments from theists out of hand, by all means, the atheist should continue to do so. It's a very convenient way of not having to consider arguments that he may not have considered and might not be able to refute. What do we have in place of the ether now? An electromagnetic field, and field theory. An electromagnetic field theory by Maxwell already existed at the time of the MM experiment. What replaced the factitious ether was NOTHING. Just empty space. It was because there was nothing to replace the construct that the experiment was repeated many times by many researchers with the same result. When Einstein invented the idea of a quantum-particle of light – a photon – it was eventually realized that you don’t need an ether or medium at all, and finally admitted that the various versions of the MM experiment proved that an ether does not exist. And quantum mechanics has shown that spontaneous generation does occur, just at a smaller scale. The term “spontaneous generation” had always been used to explain the origin of life. It had -- and today, has -- nothing to do with the appearance of virtual particles. Science proceeds by devising experiments that test unique predictions of a hypothesis, and either accepting or rejecting that hypothesis based on the results. Science proceeds by first inventing hypotheses and then trying to refute them by experiment. All experiments are attempted refutations of hypotheses. If the experiment fails to refute the hypothesis (i.e., if the experiment “succeeds”) then the hypothesis is retained as a valid statement about reality. If the experiment refutes the hypothesis (i.e., if the experiment “fails”, as did the MM experiment), then the hypothesis is eventually modified or rejected. That's the gist of it, though there are other considerations such as, can the hypothesis make predictions? Can it make retrodictions? Does it lead to other, more interesting kinds of questions? etc.

Sorry to disappoint you but not only am I a native speaker of English but I've published in the field of grammar and linguistics. So once again: Yes, it matters where one puts the negative particle "not"; however, my point was that there are several ways grammatically to express the same logical truth. Let "X" = "a method to square the circle using ruler and compass alone". The original sentence -- "Dr. Smith disproved that X exists" -- becomes: "Dr. Smith disproved that [a method to square the circle using ruler and compass alone] exists." And this is precisely the same truth as, "Dr. Smith proved that [a method to square the circle using ruler and compass alone] does not exist." The last sentence, by the way, being perfectly grammatical and perfectly logical, purports to prove a negative. As I posted earlier, we do this all the time in discourse. To "disprove" is to "refute", and it's certainly no solecism to say "Dr. Smith refuted that X exists." The sentence means "Dr. Smith proved that X does not exist." "The attorney disproved that his client was guilty." "The attorney proved that his client was not guilty." "Walter Reed disproved that Yellow Fever was spread by soiled clothing." "Walter Reed proved that Yellow Fever was not spread by soiled clothing." Same truth; two forms. You'll have to source your claim that "Dr. Smith disproved that X exists" is ungrammatical. I can easily find many examples in books, magazines, and online articles, of well-formed sentences that are isomorphic with it (and this would include interrogatories. My first hit on Google came up with "Can science prove that God does not exist?" which is merely the question-form of the statement "Science can prove that God does not exist." A sentence with which I disagree but whose grammar is unassailable. Another Google hit for the same sentence structure yielded "Thin Type 2s Disprove That Obesity Causes Diabetes." Nothing wrong here, either.). If the sentence "Dr. Smith disproved that X exists" is ungrammatical, then so is "Dr. Smith disliked that X exists", and so is "Dr. Smith disavowed that X exists", etc. All of these sentences, however, are quite obviously grammatical. Now, if what you're trying to say is that we should construct these sentences like this: "Dr. Smith disproved [the assertion] that X exists" (and please substitute any other word you like for "assertion" such as "idea" or "notion" or "hypothesis" or "theory" or "position", it really makes no difference), then I won't so much as disagree with you as simply to aver that we should do the same with the verb "prove"; thus, "Dr. Smith proved [the assertion] that X exists" (and please make the same substitutions for "assertion" as above if you wish). And we should do the same with the verb "dislike"; viz. "Dr. Smith disliked [the fact] that his funding had been discontinued." Your position is not so much incorrect as it is a bit legalistic, since few people speak or write that way and for good reason: there's nothing wrong grammatically with constructing a phrase (as opposed to a single term) as a direct object of a transitive verb. In fact, it's a very common construction.

For a much less articulate answer, here I go. There are two answers (depending on the type of god being referred to). Typically, "God" refers to the Judeo-Christian god, which cannot exist because the very concept is self-contradictory. Wrong. For a thing to exist, it must possess a specific identity. Trivially true. That it possesses a "specific identity" (which, by the way, is a redundancy) doesn't mean human beings know anything about it. Something can perfectly well have an identity and be (i) unknown, and (ii) unknowable. By contrast, the JudeoChristian god is supposedly omniscient, True. omnipotent, True. and everywhere all at once, The word is "ubiquitous", though "omnipresent" would alliterate well with the other words. i.e. is without limit, Wrong. "Everywhere" doesn't mean "without limit." thus possessing no specific identity at all, Wrong. Gravity is ubiquitous and has an identity. i.e. is non-existent. At this point you can expect your opponents to fall back on some variant of the "greek God", by saying that God does indeed possess a specific identity and exists somewhere in the universe but nonetheless chooses to hide himself from our detection. The answer to this is that the assertion of that god's existence demands sensory evidence, or is to be dismissed as arbitrary. Wrong. Most of modern physics dismisses sensory evidence as either irrelevant or at best misleading. Physics -- not the Aristotelian variety which WAS based on sensory evidence, but the hypothesis/experimental kind developed by Galileo -- got its start specifically by DOUBTING sensory evidence or dismissing it entirely. To verify this claim read Galileo's essay ("Two New Sciences"). It is not a matter of disproving that god's existence, it is a matter of dismissing the very assertion out of hand. LOL! Yes, well that IS one way of arguing...a way that is popular with many atheists. The fact of the matter is this: In checking through several of my logic textbooks -- standard manuals and treatises by Raymond J. McCall, Jacques Maritain, and William Stanley Jevons -- there is NOT ONE THING WRITTEN ABOUT THE SO-CALLED IMPOSSIBILITY OF PROVING A NEGATIVE. Fact is, we do it all the time and science itself often uses that method. The famous experiment by Michelson-Morley proved that the lumineforous aether did not exist. The famous swan's-neck glass jar experiment by Pasteur proved that spontaneous generation does not exist. A well known philosopher of science, Karl Popper, wrote in "Logic of Scientific Discovery" that science actually proceeds by proving that certain phenomena that the current hypothesis lead you to expect to occur cannot occur; i.e., DON'T EXIST. Science proceeds by proving the non-existence of certain phenomena that one assumed to exist. Finally, I should remind everyone that from the standpoint of propositional logic, it makes no difference how we phrase something grammatically. Whether we say "Dr. Smith disproved that X exists" or "Dr. Smith proved that X does not exist" is a matter of grammatical choice and convenience. Logically, they mean the same thing.