Searle: All Valid Arguments Entailed Evaluation

[Veritas Aequitas]

In Chapter 8: How To Derive "Ought" from "Is"

• Speech Acts: An Essay in Philosophy of Language,
  Cambridge University Press in 1969

Searle wrote the following Introduction where he asserted;
"to call an argument valid is already to evaluate it", see details below;

One of the oldest of metaphysical distinctions is that between fact and value.
Underlying the belief in this distinction is the perception that values somehow derive from persons and cannot lie in the world, at least not in the world of stones, rivers, trees, and brute facts.
For if they did, they would cease to be values and would become simply another part of that world.

One trouble with the distinction in the history of philosophy is that there have been many different ways of characterizing it, and they are not all equivalent.
Hume is commonly supposed to have been alluding to it in a famous passage in the Treatise where he speaks of the vicissitudes of moving from "is" to "ought".1

Moore saw the distinction in terms of the difference between "natural " properties like yellow, and what he called "non-natural" properties, like goodness.'

Ironically, Moore's successors, reversing the usual order of meta-physical progression, have read this metaphysical distinction back into language as a thesis about entailment relations in language.
So construed it is a thesis
that no set of descriptive statements an entail an evaluative statement.

I say "ironically" because language, of all plates, is riddled with counter-instances to the view that no evaluations can follow from descriptions.
As we saw in chapter 6, to call an argument valid is already to evaluate it and yet the statement that it is valid follows from certain 'descriptive' statements about it.

The very notions of what it is to be
-a valid argument,
-a cogent argument,
-a good piece of reasoning
are evaluative in the relevant sense
because, e.g., they involve the notions of what one is justified or risk in concluding, given certain premisses.

The irony, in short, lies in the fact that the very terminology in which the thesis is expressed—the terminology of entailment, meaning, and validity—presupposes the falsity of the thesis.

For example,
the statement that p entails q entails, among other things,
that anyone who asserts p is committed to the truth of q,
and that if p is known to be true then one is justified in concluding that q.

And the notions of commitment and justification in such cases are no more and no less 'evaluative' than they are when we speak of being committed to doing something or being justified in declaring war.

In this chapter I want to probe deeper into the alleged impossibility of deriving an evaluative statement from a set of descriptive statements.
Using the conclusions of the analysis of illocutionary acts in chapter 3, I shall attempt to demonstrate another counter-example to this thesis.'

It is on this basis that "All Valid Arguments Entailed Evaluation" Searle was able to use the conclusions of his illocutionary acts in chapter 3 to transpose factual premises with evaluative groundings via a series of premises to an evaluative conclusion.

Note evaluative groundings [as mentioned above] do not mean evaluative elements were included in the premises used in his argument.
Searles' Is-Ought Argument
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30045

Agree/disagree?

[Skepdick]

I must have said it a thousand times in past discussions: every adjective, in every English sentence is an evaluation.

In computer science we speak coherently about evaluation strategies and evaluation functions.

Evaluation functions evaluate (read: calculate the value of) linguistic expressions.

To assign truth-value or factual-value or moral-value to any expression, behaviour outcome or action is to evaluate it.

Ergo, the foundational problem of evaluation is the decision problem.
Any well-formed question can be stated as a yes-no question.

Is today Wednesday? Yes.
Is Earth round? Yes.
Is murder wrong? Yes.
Does X correctly describe the state of affairs? Yes.
Is X an argument? Yes.
Is the argument valid? Yes.
Is the argument sound? Yes.

It's ALL evaluation!

That's why Philosophy is going in (hermeneutic?) circles.

[Peter Holmes]

This argument is specious.

Suppose it's true that all facts are or imply evaluations or value-judgements. That wouldn't mean that all evaluations or value-judgements are facts.

That all As are B doesn't mean that all Bs are A.

To say that it does is to say that what we call truth, facts and objectivity are not what we say they are, or that they don't exist. And that's a metaphysical delusion.

[Skepdick]

This argument is specious.

You just evaluated "speciousness".

Suppose it's true

You just evaluated "truthfulness".

that all facts are or imply evaluations or value-judgements. That wouldn't mean that all evaluations or value-judgements are facts.

Drawing the distinction between facts and values is contingent upon evaluation.

That all As are B doesn't mean that all Bs are A.

To insist that A and B are "the same", or that they are "different" is to evaluate sameness or difference.

In this case you are evaluating "A is a subset of B" as being "true".

To say that it does is to say that what we call truth, facts and objectivity are not what we say they are, or that they don't exist. And that's a metaphysical delusion.

You just evaluated existence/non-existence.

[Belinda]

I must have said it a thousand times in past discussions: every adjective, in every English sentence is an evaluation.

In computer science we speak coherently about evaluation strategies and evaluation functions.

Evaluation functions evaluate (read: calculate the value of) linguistic expressions.

To assign truth-value or factual-value or moral-value to any expression, behaviour outcome or action is to evaluate it.

Ergo, the foundational problem of evaluation is the decision problem.
Any well-formed question can be stated as a yes-no question.

Is today Wednesday? Yes.
Is Earth round? Yes.
Is murder wrong? Yes.
Does X correctly describe the state of affairs? Yes.
Is X an argument? Yes.
Is the argument valid? Yes.
Is the argument sound? Yes.

It's ALL evaluation!

That's why Philosophy is going in (hermeneutic?) circles.

You are much cleverer than I, Skepdick , to be able to understand the content of these links. However what you can maybe tell me is the "evaluation" they are talking about evaluation of quantity or evaluation of quality?

The exchanges in your example , in real life, would take place between people not in social vacuums. So the people would presumably share affective connotations of words, phrases, and concepts. They might also share the purpose of the exchange which might be explicit or conversely might be poetic/social/ritualistic. Are you familiar with the work of social linguist Basil Bernstein?

[Impenitent]

entailed evaluation...

how else do you decide which is closest?



-Imp

[RCSaunders]

I must have said it a thousand times in past discussions: every adjective, in every English sentence is an evaluation.

You can keep saying it, but it is only true if you call just anything an, "evaluation," including all attributes, states, relationships, behaviors, and categories. The term, "evaluate," in computer jargon is not the same term used in English. Red, gaseous, simian, intellectual, nervous, vigorous, and metalic are not evaluations. They are only descriptions with no value relations at all.

Any well-formed question can be stated as a yes-no question.

Unless you have some preconceived notion of what well-formed means, most useful questions cannot be put into a form that can be answered with, "yes," or, "no."

What day would you like to have your appointment? (Or any other, "when," question)
How many students are in the class? (Or any other, "how many," question)
Where did you leave the keys? (Or any other, "where," question)
How do you put this puzzle together? (Or any other, "how," question)

The only questions that can be answered, "yes," or, "no," are questions to which there are only two possible answers. Even computer sorting algorithms, math functions, DtoA converters, and decision trees find results for multiple possibilities, i.e. questions with more then two possible answers.

[Skepdick]

You can keep saying it, but it is only true ....

Blah blah blah. You evaluate things as either "true" or "false".

Anything that is either true or false can be re-stated as a yes/no question.

Unless you have some preconceived notion of what well-formed means

I have a formal notion of what it means. Relational algebra and query languages

, most useful questions cannot be put into a form that can be answered with, "yes," or, "no."

Then you haven't formulated them as such. There isn't a useful question that cannot be formed as a yes/no question.

Is just a matter of asking the right question.

What day would you like to have your appointment? (Or any other, "when," question)

Would you like to have your appointment on Monday? No.
Would you like to have your appointment on Tuesday? No.
Would you. like to have your appointment on Wednesday? Yes.

How many students are in the class? (Or any other, "how many," question)

Are there more than 30 students in the class? No.
Are there more than 25 students in the class? Yes.
Are there 27 students in the class? Yes.

Where did you leave the keys? (Or any other, "where," question)

Did you leave the keys on the kitchen counter? No.
Did you leave the keys in your jacket pocket? No.
Did you leave your keys in the ignition? Yes.

How do you put this puzzle together? (Or any other, "how," question)

Do you put this puzzle like this (demonstrates incorrectly)? No.
Do you put this puzzle like this (demonstrates correctly)? Yes
Do you put this puzzle together by orienting all the colors to correspond with the the centre piece (Rubiks cube)? Yes.

The only questions that can be answered, "yes," or, "no," are questions to which there are only two possible answers.

Any question that has an answer can be posed as a yes/no question.

Even computer sorting algorithms, math functions, DtoA converters, and decision trees find results for multiple possibilities, i.e. questions with more then two possible answers.

And everything computers do cab be reduced to boolean operations. Many of them. But booleans none the less.

You might just have to ask 2^N questions.

[RCSaunders]

You can keep saying it, but it is only true ....

Blah blah blah. You evaluate things as either "true" or "false".

Anything that is either true or false can be re-stated as a yes/no question.

Unless you have some preconceived notion of what well-formed means

I have a formal notion of what it means. Relational algebra and query languages

, most useful questions cannot be put into a form that can be answered with, "yes," or, "no."

Then you haven't formulated them as such. There isn't a useful question that cannot be formed as a yes/no question.

Is just a matter of asking the right question.

What day would you like to have your appointment? (Or any other, "when," question)

Would you like to have your appointment on Monday? No.
Would you like to have your appointment on Tuesday? No.
Would you. like to have your appointment on Wednesday? Yes.

Your statement was: "Any well-formed question (singular) can be stated as a yes-no question."

You are also assuming that the possible answer to a question is already known or stored somewhere. An infinite number of questions will never answer the question, "what is your mother's maiden name?"

And of course there is no answer to the question, "what is the next number in this fractal series," unless you already know the formula for that series.

I'm really not attempting to criticize here and I understand your point. It's just a little dangerous, because there is a tendency to think of everything as dichotomies, very often, false ones.

And everything computers do can be reduced to boolean operations. Many of them. But booleans none the less.

Digital computers cannot perform many analog functions accurately and they have to be simulated, but analog computers perform those functions without boolean functions. Systems that combine analog and digital cannot be reduced to boolean operations.

The computer that Edward Lorenz used when he discovered strange attractors (Lorenz attractors of chaos theory) was an analog computer.

[Skepdick]

Your statement was: "Any well-formed question (singular) can be stated as a yes-no question."

You are also assuming that the possible answer to a question is already known or stored somewhere.

Of course it is. You've heard the expression "state of affairs" when we speak about "facts" or "truths".

"State" is another notion for "storage". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(computer_science)

Reality is the "database". If the answer is not "stored" in reality then what are you asking?

An infinite number of questions will never answer the question, "what is your mother's maiden name?"

My mother's maiden name is a finite set of characters from the English alphabet. Finite set of characters do not have infinite permutations.

And of course there is no answer to the question, "what is the next number in this fractal series," unless you already know the formula for that series.

How do you know they are "fractal series' if you don't have the formula then?

I'm really not attempting to criticize here and I understand your point. It's just a little dangerous, because there is a tendency to think of everything as dichotomies, very often, false ones.

A yes/no question doesn't inspire dichotomies. It inspires divide & conquer strategies to coping with complexity.

Digital computers cannot perform many analog functions accurately and they have to be simulated, but analog computers perform those functions without boolean functions. Systems that combine analog and digital cannot be reduced to boolean operations. The computer that Edward Lorenz used when he discovered strange attractors (Lorenz attractors of chaos theory) was an analog computer.

Yes. They can.

If the maximum frequency of your analog computer is bounded, it's digitisable.

Bounded means finite.The very concept of a "thing" in your conceptual framework reveals that your ontology is discrete.

[Skepdick]

You are much cleverer than I, Skepdick , to be able to understand the content of these links.

I'd give way more praise to excessive practice than any innate "cleverness".

However what you can maybe tell me is the "evaluation" they are talking about evaluation of quantity or evaluation of quality?

I don't think the distinction is even relevant outside of a social context. Both the qualitative and quantitative is still "experience".
You can evaluate your own internal, qualitative state.

Am I hungry? Yes.

The exchanges in your example , in real life, would take place between people not in social vacuums. So the people would presumably share affective connotations of words, phrases, and concepts. They might also share the purpose of the exchange which might be explicit or conversely might be poetic/social/ritualistic.

The social aspect adds additional dynamics in conversation/dialogue - I am not specifically focusing there. My point is made in a solipsistic (if you so will) reference frame.

In your own vocabulary/language/conceptual scheme you are continuously evaluating the input from your senses.

What is that? A car! What is that? A flower. Recognition is pattern evaluation.

Are you familiar with the work of social linguist Basil Bernstein?

Not directly, but what I am reading resembles much of my own world-view and experience. We use language to store/represents memories. Tribes form around (devolve into?) shared languages - shared memories. It's seems much of systemic functional linguistics covers this.

You can observe this even within Philosophy. We have the idealists, pragmatists, romanticists and other "ists" - we identify them by the vocabulary they use and the things they say.

[Belinda]

You are much cleverer than I, Skepdick , to be able to understand the content of these links.

I'd give way more praise to excessive practice than any innate "cleverness".

However what you can maybe tell me is the "evaluation" they are talking about evaluation of quantity or evaluation of quality?

I don't think the distinction is even relevant outside of a social context. Both the qualitative and quantitative is still "experience".
You can evaluate your own internal, qualitative state.

Am I hungry? Yes.

The exchanges in your example , in real life, would take place between people not in social vacuums. So the people would presumably share affective connotations of words, phrases, and concepts. They might also share the purpose of the exchange which might be explicit or conversely might be poetic/social/ritualistic.

The social aspect adds additional dynamics in conversation/dialogue - I am not specifically focusing there. My point is made in a solipsistic (if you so will) reference frame.

In your own vocabulary/language/conceptual scheme you are continuously evaluating the input from your senses.

What is that? A car! What is that? A flower. Recognition is pattern evaluation.

Are you familiar with the work of social linguist Basil Bernstein?

Not directly, but what I am reading resembles much of my own world-view and experience. We use language to store/represents memories. Tribes form around (devolve into?) shared languages - shared memories. It's seems much of systemic functional linguistics covers this.

You can observe this even within Philosophy. We have the idealists, pragmatists, romanticists and other "ists" - we identify them by the vocabulary they use and the things they say.

Basil Bernstein: two language codes with separate social uses. He named the codes confusingly.
1. Elaborated code I believe is what you call "solipsistic" .

2. Restricted code is actually anything but restricted IMO, as it is the code people speak when interaction is more the aim than sorting facts into categories. It is also the language code which when it become highly sophisticated develops into poetic language.

Most of the people who post here do elaborated code . Henry Quirk is an exception as he does restricted code quite deliberately . I sometimes wonder if he has learned this as a trick used by some populist politicians. No offence intended, Henry, you are always readable.
Jesus did restricted code , and efficient teachers can teach via restricted code notably humanities subjects.

Elaborated code is perhaps most obvious in instructions for assembling a motor car engine and such like linguistic blueprints. Would you say evaluation is present in instructions for assembling a car engine. Perhaps evaluation is implied in the mutual assumption the assembled engine is a better thing than the scattered parts?

[Skepdick]

Basil Bernstein: two language codes with separate social uses. He named the codes confusingly.
1. Elaborated code I believe is what you call "solipsistic" .

2. Restricted code is actually anything but restricted IMO, as it is the code people speak when interaction is more the aim than sorting facts into categories. It is also the language code which when it become highly sophisticated develops into poetic language.

If I was to object to the nomenclature - that would be my exact objection.

The word "restricted" has a negative connotation, but in practical terms it's paradoxically the opposite exactly as you point out.

Restricted languages permit more expressiveness.

Most of the people who post here do elaborated code . Henry Quirk is an exception as he does restricted code quite deliberately . I sometimes wonder if he has learned this as a trick used by some populist politicians. No offence intended, Henry, you are always readable.
Jesus did restricted code , and efficient teachers can teach via restricted code notably humanities subjects.

The notion of "restricted" code can also be understood as "compression" (exactly as it sounds: more of X in the same space). As language evolves/becomes more and more sophisticated we encode more and more meaning (experiences, history) into the same words. Till we arrive at words like God - which mean everything.

Would you say evaluation is present in instructions for assembling a car engine.

Yes. You have to extract the intended meaning of the words (was it Gadamer's idea that "understanding a text" means to recover the totality of the author's intent?). If you can't do that, or you extract the meaning incorrectly then the code wasn't as "elaborate" as it seemed.

Perhaps evaluation is implied in the mutual assumption the assembled engine is a better thing than the scattered parts?

Between you and the manual there's no "mutual assumption".

You want to assemble the engine. You are reading the manual that tells you how.

[Peter Holmes]

Whatever facts we use to explain or justify a moral judgement, it remains a judgement, and is therefore subjective.

The counter-claim (itself a factual assertion) - that what we call facts themselves express judgements or evaluations - even if it's true, makes no difference. We can simply re-state the previous sentence with substitution, as follows.

Whatever judgements or evaluations we use to explain or justify a moral judgement, it remains a judgement, and is therefore subjective.

In other words, re-defining facts does nothing to establish the objectivity of morality. Obviously, if there are no facts (as we understand them), there are no moral facts. So in that case, morality isn't and can't be what we call objective.

[Skepdick]

Whatever facts we use to explain or justify a moral judgement, it remains a judgement, and is therefore subjective.

The counter-claim (itself a factual assertion) - that what we call facts themselves express judgements or evaluations - even if it's true, makes no difference. We can simply re-state the previous sentence with substitution, as follows.

Whatever judgements or evaluations we use to explain or justify a moral judgement, it remains a judgement, and is therefore subjective.

In other words, re-defining facts does nothing to establish the objectivity of morality. Obviously, if there are no facts (as we understand them), there are no moral facts. So in that case, morality isn't and can't be what we call objective.

Strawman. Judgments are objective features of reality.

It is a logical fact that judgments have logical truth-value. I am justifying it with the logical fact that judgments are deducible as theorems in deductive systems. https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/judgment

You have ignored correction on this point on multiple occasion so you can no longer plead ignorance - it's malice.

You are intentionally lying. Why?

So, it turns out that, like aesthetic ones, moral value-judgements have no truth-value.

Why do you keep lying even after having been corrected literally the post before?

Judgments have truth-value in high order logic.

https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/judgmental+equality
https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/judgment
(....)