Prescriptions: You have yet to explain how you get an ought that is not based on a definition or empirical means. Transferring the problem to different words such as duty or obligation does nothing to solve it, it simply avoids it.
I've never maintained that you can derive an objective ought, in fact I've explicitly argued against it. These arguments that I've used are philosophical, and hence that philosophy gives us the truth that there are no objective moral prescriptions. Furthermore I've argued conditionally that
if there are objective moral prescriptions, then these are derived philosophically. In support of the consequent of that conditional I offered some examples of some attempts to derive objective moral prescriptions
egoist attempts,
the categorical imperative, or
Searlian attempts none of which are purely definitional or empirical.
Theism: This is mostly a side issue, but your definition of theism would exclude Christianity, so your claim is patently false. By defining God as being outside of the universe, you’re defining the trinity, which includes Jesus, as being outside of the universe. This destroys the entire Biblical narrative of Christianity. This is far from prevalent. The God of Christianity must have intervened in human history or else you don’t have Christianity.
Jesus is indeed an exception to the usual divine transcendence in Judaism, Islam, and the other 2 parts of the trinity. However he is still not empirically accessible because the past is not empirically accessible.
As per the other issue, I don’t think we have gained any understanding from theological discussions. This is because theism, as a predictive model, is bankrupt.
It's not really relevant as to whether or not theism is true, because if it false, then that is still a truth that has been philosophically discovered. Falsification is a truth discovery that has yielded new information.
Nothingness: How are you not applying causation to nothing? You are saying that nothing causes something.
This means that the antecedent is no longer what you referred to as nothing because it now has a causal relationship to something. What you referred to as nothing has no referent. It is as poor as the definition I chose and I chose mine as a way to demonstrate how pointless it is to define nothingness. We learn as much about the world by this discussion as saying X is a thing that has no referent and we know this is thing has no referent.
Creating words does not increase our knowledge about the world.
You misinterpret me here. Nothing is causally impotent, no one denies this. That really misses the point however. My point is not that nothing
causes something to come into being out of it, but rather that something may come into being
uncaused out of nothing. This is because there is simply no causality in a state of nothingness, we cannot apply laws or regularities on nothingness such as causality. Hence something may simply come into being uncaused spontaneously ex nihilo.
On your point about how if nothing is metaphysically impossible, then we have not learned anything: If we were simply creating empty words and then saying that they have no referent, I would agree that it may be plausibly asserted that we have not learned anything new about reality. However nothingness is not an empty word. It minimally refers to a concept. If we discover that that concept has no equivalent in reality I think it can be said that we have learned something new about reality.
Knowledge: I guess I didn’t make the context clear. It would be in a Bayesian context. This would specify what it means to have justification. Propositions that have a high probability of being true, based on the observations, and quantified in Bayesian terms would be considered knowledge. To a Bayesian, this would simply boil down to having a belief held to a high degree of confidence, and in order to be consistent with their position, they would need the supporting evidence. Someone could assert that they know something that they do not know, and you could challenge them to justify their figures and support them with the available evidence. If they can’t then you can conclude that they don’t actually know X and are simply and falsely asserting it. On my definition, there is no higher than knowledge, it’s simply knowledge. I don’t find this %100 requirement to typically of what people refer to knowledge. According to this, science has not contributed one iota to our body of knowledge (since it must be falsifiable, it can’t be %100). I think most people would disagree with this sentiment.
I don't think that adding the sentiment that you are talking about Bayesian probability when you say beliefs that have a high probability of being true changes anything about the study of knowledge as a philosophical discipline. For, as I understand it, Bayesian probability just defines how you calculate probability using evidence acting on prior probability, but it does not help to determine what constitutes evidence or how we determine prior probabilities. The definition of evidence according to Bayesian probability is something like, a given fact x counts as evidence towards hypothesis y if and only if the probability of y is greater given the truth of x, than it would have been without the truth of x. Notice how this does nothing to help us answer questions about how we know whether or not x is true, and those types of questions are precisely the realm of philosophical epistemology. It remains clear that Bayesian probability doesn’t answer any of those central questions of epistemology that I noted such as what are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources? What is its structure, and what are its limits? How do we acquire it? All that Bayesian probability can do is plug those known facts into a formula once we have that knowledge.
Additionally, justification does not just fall out as a result of your definition via Bayesian probability. For instance, a theist may have revelation that god speaks to them, for them this counts as a fact and thus evidence, on a Bayesian definition, for god’s existence. However unless you want to concede that revelation constitutes justification towards a truth claim then you would have to admit that just because you can use Bayesian probability does not mean that you are justified in thinking you have the evidence that you are plugging into the formula. It’s simply not the case that “facts” you plug into the formula are necessarily justified; that is a question beyond simple probability calculus.
As for the 100% criteria on knowledge, that comes from the usual definition of knowledge as justified, true belief. Not justified, probably true belief. Now when you try to redefine knowledge as the latter, I point out that there is a thing that is "higher" than knowledge on your definition, namely, the former definition. You respond by saying "On my definition, there is no higher than knowledge, it’s simply knowledge." Well, uhh, there clearly is. True is higher than probably true. And as I said, on your definition "there simply is no term for that, and if there were, then that would be what I mean by knowledge." It is true that this is not how the layman uses the term in everyday conversation, but rarely do laymen use specialized terms in their technical meaning. I bet that when you ask the average person on the street what a vacuum is, for instance, you will hear about how you use it to clean your carpet, not that it is space without matter. And indeed as I say, this is how the term is classically used philosophically, hence Socrates' famous quote, "As for me, all I know is that I know nothing."
Begging the Question (Science): Let’s take this slow. Our goal is to try to emulate or model nature as accurately as possible (this is how we determine what is true or not and we want to increase the ratio of true beliefs to false ones). This means that whatever process does this the best (doesn’t have to be the best, only needs to be the best one available) is the best process for our goal. We determine how well they do by comparing its result to nature because that is our original goal. We determine the best by comparing it to the results of others. We have a problem, we try solutions for that problem and one of the solutions works the best. How is this begging the question?
Well of course we are trying to determine what method of inquiry best models nature, and that is precisely the question we need an answer to. But in your test, you've already assumed that it's science that does so, and that is why it is arguing in a circle, and could cause those problems that I mentioned such as undermining the undermining and all of the other results given by the use of science to judge the results. Additionally, I don't understand how if you use scientific inquiry to test the results of scientific inquiry you won't get exactly identical answers. In fact this seems to be true no matter what you use to test results and hence this is why we don't answer epistemological questions in this way. If you did come up with different results, wouldn't this seem to indicate a flaw in the test rather than the method, since presumably assuming induction (which you need to do), doing the same exact test with the same exact method should yield identical results. Further absurdities; say you did go through with the test and, contra induction (which would then destroy science anyway), you manage to prove scientifically that science is not as accurate as revelation, and suppose you ignore the fact that according to your results you can't trust your results, and you say revelation is more accurate. Now are you to redo the test with revelation as the judge?? Now what if science comes out on top in this test??? Headaches! I think this is the most poorly designed experiment ever.
Realism: As I have said above, by your definition of knowledge, science can’t know anything which makes answering your question as to whether science can know anything about reality trivially easy. No, it can’t. Because you have defined knowledge in a particular way, and because of the definition of science, we have answered a “central issue in the philosophy of science.” What have we learned along the way about nature? Nothing, as you state it, it is a futile exercise.
Creating words does not increase our understanding of the world.
When it comes to "knowing" anything outside of necessary mathematical truths or logical truths, we are not going to be able to know them in the traditional philosophical sense. So when I ask the epistemological question of realism and anti-realism, whether or not we can know if our scientific models are accurate representations of reality, I mean know in more of a definition similar to yours like justified, probably true belief. It would be more like trying to answer the question, why think that scientific models are accurate representations of reality or not? And so far as there are reasons, there is justification. So far as they are sound and valid, they may establish probable truth either affirmative or negative. In this way it becomes a very reasonable question to try to ask and we can learn new information about the nature of science with relation to reality by answering it. Very little can be established as certain knowledge, but we can also establish probable truth with philosophical argumentation in such topics as scientific realism and anti-realism, which are beyond the purview of science.
Modal Logic: Suppose I create a concepts X1, X2…Xn and they are all self-contradictory, what have I learned? I know that they don’t refer to anything, but what have I learned about nature? Has my understanding of nature increased? According to you, my knowledge has grown by leaps and bounds, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything meaningful about nature. Again,
creating words does not increase our understanding of the world.
You seem to imply that creating self-contradictory concepts is all there is to modal logic, which simply isn't true. There are plenty of modal arguments, using empirically inaccessible possible worlds, that, if successful, establish new and important information about the actual world such as the modal argument for dualism, the modal ontological argument, Kripke's argument against identity theory, the modal argument against utilitarianism, etc. In fact I think I could formulate a modal argument against modal logic being only the creation of self-contradictory concepts, and now that I think of it I could have used a modal argument against the idea that "skill is the ability to win" in BPC's arguing against subjectivity thread in the Brawl stage discussion. Ah, the wonders of modality!
Dualism: The problem that I have is the same as posed by the Star Trek transporter problem. When you enter a teleport, it does not actually transport you, but the information of the placement of your material is sent and then an identical copy of “you” is made at the destination. Now, is this copy “you”? It would be identical to “you” but would it be “you”? What if it sent the information and built a copy of “you” before “you” were destroyed? Would there be two “yous”? I think this violates our concept of personal identity, and I’m being reminded by this because Word’s spell check is telling me that the plurality of “you” is not grammatically correct. As soon as I try to imagine “myself” being in the body of someone else, I lose the meaning of the term “myself.” It would be equivalent to saying that a clone of you is the same (not the same material configuration, but the same whatever “you” means) as you. This is not obviously true to me. The concept of personal identity would need to be clearly defined and made sure to apply at all times.
It seems to me that we don't have to be bogged down in these messy issues of identity, which really shouldn't be a major issue here, all we need to do is clarify our terms. I'm going to use the symbols b for your body and c for your conscious identity (which is a function of the mind). In order to affirm the first premise all one needs to do is imagine c existing without b. In order to do this I sketched a possible scenario of c existing without b that is easy to imagine and has been depicted with minor differences in movies and such, therefore it should be obvious that it if you can depict it, you can imagine it. Add another person with a body and conscious identity, we will refer to you as consisting of b
1 and c
1, and the other person as consisting of b
2 and c
2. Now we imagine that you wake up and find that c
1 has been switched with c
2, such that c
1 is now "in" b
2, and c
2 is "in" b
1. Now somehow b
1 is destroyed. Now you have c
1 existing without b
1, and that is the first premise. So long as you can even imagine that scenario then the first premise is true. And the fact I can type up a description of it, think about it, and even watch movies or draw pictures of such a scenario indicates that it is minimally imaginable, for imaginability is a necessary condition for these actions.
I don't enter God debates because I don't find them interesting.
