cabrutus: “… denials of conditionals don’t mean what people think they mean”

Or maybe conditionals don’t mean what logicians in the early 20th century drilled us to think they mean.

The question is who is to be the master, that’s all.

Well, what (~A -> ~P) -> G says is: “God exists if: it’s the case that my prayers aren’t answered (by God) only if I don’t pray.” But that does intuitively imply that God exists: prayers can only be answered (the way we’re using that term) if God does in fact exist.

So I don’t see the problem at this point.

Of course, there is a problem with the idea that truth-functional material implication expresses the same thing as an English “if-then” or “only if” phrase.

“Way to make a fool of yourself. You’re good at that, anonymous pussy.”

Why are you comparing the anonymous poster to a vagina?

Is that supposed to be an insult?

“Way to make a fool of yourself. You’re good at that, anonymous pussy.”

Why are you comparing the anonymous poster to a vagina?

Is that supposed to be an insult?

Alex: “If people like Cheney have access to firearms either way, how does giving them to everyone else at the same time really help anyone?”

I don’t think that Roderick intended his remarks as an argument against gun control legislation (although of course he opposes that). He intended them as a reply to an argument for it that opportunistic advocates might make in light of the recent events. The point being that Cheney, as one of the most powerful members of the political class, would have access to guns with or without stricter gun control legislation, so his recent misadventures don’t prove anything one way or the other about gun control.

That said, it does point the way toward one of the arguments against gun control legislation: advocates often act as if it just abolished guns from society. But it doesn’t: what it does is to mandate that the men of the political classes, or their deputized enforcers, have guns, and that nobody else does, as far as the State can reliably enforce its will. That is to say, that military or paramilitary forces under the command of the State will be armed, and resourceful outlaw gangs may be armed, and the rest of us will be almost entirely depend on the former (thus on the good graces of both the enforcers and the political class) for our own bodily safety. I can’t see how that’s a humane or reliable plan for greater autonomy and freedom.

I should note that I’m not actually concerned with (as you’ve worried here and worried elsewhere) the prospects of using widespread gun ownership to mount a successful insurrection against tyrannical governments. I don’t think that prospect is as easy to discount as you seem to think it is (lots of ad hoc guerrilla forces armed mostly with Kalashnikovs and rudimentary explosives have seriously contested, or even defeated, the armed force of world powers in recent history). But that’s not my primary point here; my primary point is about the way in which the situation created by gun control requires ordinary people to be dependent on a professional class of military and paramilitary “enforcers” and “defenders,” and the way in which that dependence is corrosive of freedom and conducive to rampant abuses by the contemptuous pigs. Cf. GT 2004-11-30: Condoleeza’s Right and especially my clarificatory comment to Fred Vincy for more on the theme. The basic idea is that gun control contributes to the conditions that sustain the perceived need for large standing armies, large regimented professional police forces, etc., and that those are corrosive to freedom and dangerous to us “civilians.”

I don’t think this quite comes under the heading of either 1 or 2. I do endorse 1 (as I’ve mentioned) and I don’t really care much about 2 one way or the other. But this seems to me to be a different argument from either.

Stephen, I’m glad to hear that Jimmy Carter is taking a public stand against Bush’s Charles I imitation. Good on him. But what’s having (or not having) two testicles got to do with anything?

Hamilton: “To say that Carter was the worst President in history is putting it mildly.”

If you can’t remember any Presidents from before 1976, maybe.

Given that the office of the Presidency has hosted several active slavers, at least one genocidaire, and arch-segregationist admirers of the Ku Klux Klan, I’d have to say this seems rather like American historical myopia at its most ridiculous.

Hamilton: “Nixon ended the war …”

After escalating it for the entirety of his first term. Come on. You won’t find any love for LBJ here, but there are in fact some evils in the world that Democrats didn’t cause.

Noumena, I think you’ve got me mixed up with Mike. I don’t think that (4) is meaningless; I think it’s false. Actually, Mike thinks it’s false rather than meaningless, too; what he suggests that if God does not exist, then nothing you can do counts as praying to God. I think that’s either untrue (if you’re using “X prayed to Y” the same way that we often use “X wrote a letter to Santa Claus”), or uninteresting (since if you’re using “X prayed to Y” in a way that presupposes that Y exists, we can always come up with a new proposition, e.g. “I say my prayers”, that doesn’t).

All that I’ve said about (4) is that, when read using material implication, it is only as plausible as the denial of premise (1) (as opposed to the original English sentence, which was intuitively plausible independently of whether I pray or not).

I agree with you that your (4’) is plausibly true — as I’d suggested already above. But it’s not an accurate translation of what the original sentence means, either; it’s actually logically a stronger claim than the original. (The original merely denied that there’s a connection between saying prayers and those prayers being answered if God doesn’t exist. 4’ actually asserts that prayers won’t be answered if you make them and God doesn’t exist. (That’s a claim you can justify apriori, but it’s a different one from the original.)

Noumena, I’m not claiming that pounding out a truth-table for (4) won’t show why it’s unacceptable as a premise (or, what amounts to the same thing, applying M.I. to transform (4) into ~G—>(P&~A), as I did above). I recognize that the argument, as formalized, is just unsound.

What I am suggesting is that the fact that (4) ever seemed plausible in the first place highlights one of the difficulties inherent in being trained to instinctively translate “if p, then q” into “p materially implies q” when you formalize your argument. The premise is intuitively true, but only as long as you’re just reading it as “if-then,” in one of the ordinary English senses, and not as “either not-P or A.”

And I think there may be a moral to the story as to how far strictly technical advances in logic, such as the introduction and intensive use of material implication in foundational logic, deserves the kind of metaphilosophical fanfare that it got early in the last century.

Annie: “Does the fact that riders are paying for their rides not figure into the equation?”

If the riders were being denied rides that they paid for, then they’d have a right to demand the money back. But having paid someone to give you a lift once doesn’t entitle you to demand that you can pay to get a lift from that person whenever you want in the future.

Scott: “Only over-privileged individuals think they are “entitled” to rides from other persons.”

True story: I cook for a pizza place located just off campus in Ann Arbor, and my one late night shift is Saturdays from midnight to 4:00am. One of the first nights I worked this shift, I got bawled out by some lightly buzzed college brat because I wouldn’t tell drivers (who don’t work for me) to drive out to take a pizza to him even though it’s not their job to drive where he lives. The store that served his address was closed, but he was positive that we had to not only make a pizza for him, but drive it out to his place, because he happened to live on a street that’s just off the street that our store is also on (which happens to be one of the main thoroughfares in town, and runs all the way across Ann Arbor and across most of Ypsilanti, too). I suggested that if he wanted the pizza that badly he could place a take-out order and come get his own pizza. This was met with an outraged tirade which lasted for several minutes before he wished me a “shitty night” and hung up the phone.

The poor lad. It is so hard to find good help these days.

Incidentally, for an interesting compare and contrast, see Lewis Carroll’s article A Logical Paradox, from the July 1894 issue of Mind, in which Carroll presents a puzzle with a different kind of nested conditional (“If C is true, then: if A is true, B is not true”). Russell and everybody thereafter thought that this puzzle was trivially solved if you based your theory of conditionals on material implication. Of course, Carroll couldn’t be blamed for not seeing this, since there wasn’t any widespread notion of material implication in English logic until a few years after he died; but (the idea goes) you could just chuck the puzzle out once you got rid of primitive vagueness about logical conditionals.

But, given that material implication causes its own problems with seemingly plausible nested conditionals, as seen here, this may just go to show that it’s a bit harder to dismiss puzzles as relics of antiquated logical notation (made obsolete by the march of technical progress) than some philosophers in the last century were inclined to think. And that Carroll’s questions about implication remain interesting (and open) after all these years. (For more, see my extended post on the puzzle.)