Peter Holmes: What is Fact.

[Veritas Aequitas]

Peter Holmes,
In the post below you defined 'what is a fact'.

A fact is a state-of-affairs, or a description of a state-of-affairs, that is or was the case.

The above definition is merely linguistic and tell us nothing about what a fact-in-reality is.

Can you demonstrate what a fact-in-itself really is?

I am sure what is fact to you will lead to this, it has to be;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact

Therefrom to this;
There are Moral Facts
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=29777

[odysseus]

Veritas Aequitas wrote

Peter Holmes,
In the post below you defined 'what is a fact'.
Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Wed Sep 16, 2020 12:27 am
A fact is a state-of-affairs, or a description of a state-of-affairs, that is or was the case.
The above definition is merely linguistic and tell us nothing about what a fact-in-reality is.

Can you demonstrate what a fact-in-itself really is?

He gets this from Wittgenstein. The problem is a big one, by my lights: Wittgenstein argues that if there were a big book that contained all the facts of all there is, it would contain no references to value and ethics. This is because what makes something ethically right or wrong is not observable empirically nor is it apriori, a product of logical form, like modus ponens (actually, I don't think Witt considers logic to be a fact generating source. It only produces tautologies. Anyway..). Facts are presented in propositions, like "the Earth is closer to the sun than Mars". There are an infinite number of facts, all of them equal for there is no value that a raises one over another. Helium has an atomic number of 2 and my socks were washed yesterday. So what to both of them. Value is what does the meaningful difference making, but where is the value? How does one find it, point to it? I plunge a knife into another's kidney because he stole my dessert: if you argue that this is wrong morally then the argument will come down to, not just the description of the affairs, the rules we have against certain actions, or even the agony produced; it will come down to the "wrongness" of the agony that underlies the rules we make. This wrongness, this ethical "badness' does not show itself. Witt says ethics is essentially transcendental, and I think he's right.

It is an odd affair, but I think if one really understands what Wittgenstein has in mind, one understands something rather profound about ethics. (Incidentally, see his "Lecture on Ethics" which is available online, I think. It is short and free of jargon.)

[Impenitent]

the question remains...

will filling your socks with helium help you levitate or merely raise the tone of your voice momentarily?

-Imp

[Veritas Aequitas]

He gets this from Wittgenstein.
.......
It is an odd affair, but I think if one really understands what Wittgenstein has in mind, one understands something rather profound about ethics. (Incidentally, see his "Lecture on Ethics" which is available online, I think. It is short and free of jargon.)

I downloaded W's "Lecture of Ethics" where he concluded,

• My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless.
  Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.

I don't think Peter Holmes' basis of fact as statement of affairs is directly related to Wittgenstein's "about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable."

PH's fact as statement of affairs is basically from Analytic Philosophy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_ ... hilosophy)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/states-of-affairs/

The point is whatever is fact or states of affairs they must be justified empirically and philosophically to be true.

If 'Snow is white' is true it must be justified empirically and philosophically to be true.
To justify snow is white is true, one will need to rely on a Framework and System of Knowledge. [FSK]
The most effective FSK for the above purpose is the Scientific Framework and System.
Therefore whatever is "fact" is conditioned by the Scientific Framework and System. Such a fact cannot standalone by itself.

Moral facts are states-of-affairs that justified empirically and philosophically as conditioned via a specific Moral Framework and System.

[Peter Holmes]

He gets this from Wittgenstein.
.......
It is an odd affair, but I think if one really understands what Wittgenstein has in mind, one understands something rather profound about ethics. (Incidentally, see his "Lecture on Ethics" which is available online, I think. It is short and free of jargon.)

I downloaded W's "Lecture of Ethics" where he concluded,

• My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless.
  Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.

I don't think Peter Holmes' basis of fact as statement of affairs is directly related to Wittgenstein's "about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable."

Erm. Wittgenstein is talking about ethics and religion here - not what we call facts.

PH's fact as statement of affairs is basically from Analytic Philosophy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_ ... hilosophy)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/states-of-affairs/

The point is whatever is fact or states of affairs they must be justified empirically and philosophically to be true.

Notice your mistake here. Outside language, a state-of-affairs - a feature of reality that is or was the case - has no truth-value. It isn't true or false. The only features of reality that have truth-value are factual assertions, which are linguistic expressions. In other words, there's a crucial and fundamental difference between the two uses of the word 'fact'.

If 'Snow is white' is true it must be justified empirically and philosophically to be true.

Correspondence theories of truth provide a convenient and popular account of what makes a factual assertion what we call 'true'. But the basic claim - 'snow is white' is true because snow is white - is a perfect tautology - a purely linguistic exercise. We can use the word 'dog' to talk about what we call dogs, but there's nothing canine about the word 'dog', or the word 'canine'. A name no more corresponds with what we use it to name than an arrow corresponds with its target. The later Wittgenstein's hard-won insight - that meaning is use - has profound implications.

To justify snow is white is true, one will need to rely on a Framework and System of Knowledge. [FSK]
The most effective FSK for the above purpose is the Scientific Framework and System.
Therefore whatever is "fact" is conditioned by the Scientific Framework and System. Such a fact cannot standalone by itself.

This is merely to say any description - and therefore any truth-claim - is contextual and conventional. But that's trivially true and inconsequential.

Moral facts are states-of-affairs that justified empirically and philosophically as conditioned via a specific Moral Framework and System.

Nope. That every factual assertion is 'conditioned' doesn't mean that every assertion is factual. What makes an assertion factual is that it claims something about reality that may or may not be or have been the case - something that is or was REAL. And moral realists and objectivists have failed to demonstrate the real, actual existence of moral features of reality - moral things that may or may not be or have been the case. Saying 'slavery is morally wrong' is NOT like saying 'snow is white'. The word 'is' in each assertion has a completely different function - a different use.

There are three separate things: features of reality; what we believe and know about them; and what we say about them, which, classically, may be true or false. And it's a mistake to muddle them up. Moral realists claim there are moral features of reality, and theirs is the burden of proving such things exist - unmet so far, to my knowledge.

[odysseus]

Peter Holmes wrote
Nope. That every factual assertion is 'conditioned' doesn't mean that every assertion is factual. What makes an assertion factual is that it claims something about reality that may or may not be or have been the case - something that is or was REAL. And moral realists and objectivists have failed to demonstrate the real, actual existence of moral features of reality - moral things that may or may not be or have been the case. Saying 'slavery is morally wrong' is NOT like saying 'snow is white'. The word 'is' in each assertion has a completely different function - a different use.

There are three separate things: features of reality; what we believe and know about them; and what we say about them, which, classically, may be true or false. And it's a mistake to muddle them up. Moral realists claim there are moral features of reality, and theirs is the burden of proving such things exist - unmet so far, to my knowledge.

I would argue that saying slavery is wrong is factual and the meaning that grounds both of these is what grounds the factuality. It's an argument, but it is not easy to out forth in a post. Here is the essential thought:

GE Moore called value an unnatural property, and as I see it, he did this for the a reason that Wittgenstein banished ethical theory from conversation. Unnatural for Moore because it's not empirical nor is it analytic, but then, there is something there is that cannot be dismissed and is indeed deeply important, or even, the only "important" theme philosophy can take up, and this is value. Wittgenstein said there is no value, and if there were, it would have no value. He is making the same kind of claim here as he does with logic: Logic shows itself, but cannot be seen (a Zen master might put it this way. Could probably construct a nice haiku out of it) because in order to "see" logic itself one is still bound to logic, that is, the forms of rational thought. Regarding value, it does show itself in our experiences, but to understand it one would have to pin it to language, contain what it is in language, and value cannot be so pinned because it is not found in the "facts" of the world. It transcends facts (this is from his Tractatus, of course). Why can't it be so found? Because it is there, like the color yellow is there minus the concept 'yellow'. It is in the unspeakable fabric of the world that Wittgenstein wants to be clear about. W follows Kant and his noumena, in drawing a division between what makes sense and what is nonsense and it is nonsense that is produced when you try to put in language what not linguistic. Taking the term "world" in a looser context, the point is that one cannot speak the world, one cannot say an intuition, empirical or otherwise.
I read Wittgenstein as being both right and wrong on this.
It's a deep rabbit hole, but my thoughts on this continue into what it is that separates value statements from empirical statements. That is, if states of affairs are necessarily exlusive of value judgments, this constitutes an arbitrary standard regarding content, the content of what language can possess. It comes down to, we can talk about ships and planets and dogs and cats but what makes language a functioning medium is not that it takes up the world unconditioned, but because we have shared experiences, (or, we think we do, which is enough) which are presented in agreement. The content? A ship or a cow is, after all, NOT that thing out there. Its Being lies with the way we take that thing AS a ship or a cow. Value can be taken up AS in the same way. I am a moral realist.

[odysseus]

Veritas Aequitas wrote
The point is whatever is fact or states of affairs they must be justified empirically and philosophically to be true.

If 'Snow is white' is true it must be justified empirically and philosophically to be true.
To justify snow is white is true, one will need to rely on a Framework and System of Knowledge. [FSK]
The most effective FSK for the above purpose is the Scientific Framework and System.
Therefore whatever is "fact" is conditioned by the Scientific Framework and System. Such a fact cannot standalone by itself.

Moral facts are states-of-affairs that justified empirically and philosophically as conditioned via a specific Moral Framework and System.

I agree with this. I think they are states of affairs just as "the moon has less mass than the earth" is a state of affairs. But why? There has to be something empirical about morality in order for science to make a claim, but there isn't. This is why scientists steer clear of ethics. Indeed, they are absolutely mute on the subject. Ethics is not there, like the Titanic or an electron. Look for it, and in vanishes before your eyes, because when you all find in an ethical problem is the visible facts: yes, he did steal the goat from Farmer John, and John did value the goat, and there are laws that forbid stealing, etc., etc. but then inquire to more basic questions: what is it that makes the stealing wrong? well, if everyone were allowed to steal freely, the concept of ownership would be jeopardized, chaos would ensue...But what is wrong with chaos? And so on, down to the the nitty gritty: Value, the question of the value of value. So what if Farmer John starves and suffers? Why is this bad?

Analytic philosophy follows Wittgenstein, or at least Wittgenstein's argument that such a question lies in the hands of religion, not philosophy. We cannot SAY what is bad about pain and misery, or what is good about pleasure and happiness. We re simply presented with these as, if you like, the qualia of the world, unspeakable.

To say as you do, and as I do, that moral states of affairs are factual states of affairs, one would have to somehow pin this nebulous concept of ethical badness or goodness down. Analytic thinkers will say, yes, pain is bad, but this is a subjective response, localized, like any other empirical event. Beyond the witnessing, the empirical "ouch," there is no badness to be found at all. It is what nature, if you will, does, and to make a theoretical move beyond this is vacuous.

Important to see that it is not the ouch in question. It is the moral badness of the ouch! Wittgenstein say that moral judgments are all absolutes beneath the skin. He is talking about this mysterious badness of the ouch. Unseen, not empirically graspable, invisible to the mind's understanding, the weirdest damn thing in all of existence. Wittgenstein was a very religious person, and I agree: Religion is all about our pains and blisses BUT: can we not talk about it? The threshold where language meets the world? This is why I read Husserl, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Levinas, and so on. then on to the French!

[Skepdick]

There has to be something empirical about morality in order for science to make a claim, but there isn't.

The reason scientists remain quiet is because morality is a controversial topic and science doesn't benefit from such controversy.
We've figured out that explaining complex ideas to simple minds doesn't work - better to remain silent.

None the less morality and moral progress is empirical.

Take a statistical chart plotting "number of people killed in genocides". You know damn well up-over-time is bad and down-over-time is good.
Take a chart plotting "average human life expectancy". You know damn well up-over-time is good and down-over-time is bad.

If you can quantify the notions of "better" (improvement) and "worse" (deterioration) it's empirical. Some people just don't know how to operate their empirical faculties.

I find it hard to believe that you can't tell which way is "better" and which way is "worse in any of the charts on this website.

[odysseus]

Skepdick wrote

Take a statistical chart plotting "number of people killed in genocides". You know damn well up-over-time is bad and down-over-time is good.
Take a chart plotting "average human life expectancy". You know damn well up-over-time is good and down-over-time is bad.

If you can quantify the notions of "better" (improvement) and "worse" (deterioration) it's empirical. Some people just don't know how to operate their empirical faculties.

I find it hard to believe that you can't tell which way is "better" and which way is "worse in any of the charts on this website.

Sure I can tell, and I agree with you that up over time is bad. But you have to address the issue of the very nature of ethical good and bad itself. It is a metaethical question. What is the ethical good and bad at the level of the most basic questions.

[Skepdick]

Sure I can tell, and I agree with you that up over time is bad. But you have to address the issue of the very nature of ethical good and bad itself. It is a metaethical question. What is the ethical good and bad at the level of the most basic questions.

"The very nature of...." is philosophical hogwash.

The meta-foundation of everything is some linguistic definition/description/theory or another obfuscated into such generality so as to be useless and in-actionable in practice. Language doesn't work like that.

The entire medical profession's theory of good-and-bad fits in a slogan: Primum non nocere. If doctors can live without foundations - so can philosophers.

We can describe goals, desirable and undesirable states (success and failure). We do this on case-by-case basis and by getting stuck in the particulars while we try to think of any potential harmful side-effects.

It's all best effort.

[Veritas Aequitas]

He gets this from Wittgenstein.
.......
It is an odd affair, but I think if one really understands what Wittgenstein has in mind, one understands something rather profound about ethics. (Incidentally, see his "Lecture on Ethics" which is available online, I think. It is short and free of jargon.)

I downloaded W's "Lecture of Ethics" where he concluded,

• My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless.
  Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.

I don't think Peter Holmes' basis of fact as statement of affairs is directly related to Wittgenstein's "about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable."

Erm. Wittgenstein is talking about ethics and religion here - not what we call facts.

You have to read the whole article.
W stated if we were to identify all the facts in reality, we will never find what is supposed ethically within reality.
W is wrong on this [re no value from fact, no ought from is].
He missed out the human factor, i.e. there are facts within the brain of humans who are identifying all the facts in reality.
The 7+ billion of humans are part and parcel of reality existing as facts of reality.
Whatever is ethical is not external facts but active moral facts represented by neural and human processes.

PH's fact as statement of affairs is basically from Analytic Philosophy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_ ... hilosophy)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/states-of-affairs/

The point is whatever is fact or states of affairs they must be justified empirically and philosophically to be true.

Notice your mistake here. Outside language, a state-of-affairs - a feature of reality that is or was the case - has no truth-value. It isn't true or false.

The only features of reality that have truth-value are factual assertions, which are linguistic expressions.
In other words, there's a crucial and fundamental difference between the two uses of the word 'fact'.

You are the one who is mistaken due to ignorance.
What you are referring to is the specific Language Framework and System. I agree when taken outside its context there is no true or false.

You are very ignorant is insisting,
The only features of reality that have truth-value are factual assertions, which are linguistic expressions.

I have been telling you a 1000 times, what is fact or truth is justified from its specific FSL.

• What is a Fact?
  viewtopic.php?f=8&t=29486
  
  There are Moral Facts
  viewtopic.php?f=8&t=29777

There are degrees of veracity relative to each specific FSK.

The fact from your insisted Lingua FSK are empty facts and truth.

They linguistic facts are only realized by other specific FKS, the most reliable is the Scientific FSK.
Even then, the most credible FSK we have at present only produce facts that are at best 'polished conjectures'.

If 'Snow is white' is true it must be justified empirically and philosophically to be true.

Correspondence theories of truth provide a convenient and popular account of what makes a factual assertion what we call 'true'. But the basic claim - 'snow is white' is true because snow is white - is a perfect tautology - a purely linguistic exercise. We can use the word 'dog' to talk about what we call dogs, but there's nothing canine about the word 'dog', or the word 'canine'. A name no more corresponds with what we use it to name than an arrow corresponds with its target. The later Wittgenstein's hard-won insight - that meaning is use - has profound implications.

Note I stated the above, linguistic facts like 'snow is white iff snow is white' are empty facts until they are realized by empirically and philosophically.

To justify snow is white is true, one will need to rely on a Framework and System of Knowledge. [FSK]
The most effective FSK for the above purpose is the Scientific Framework and System.
Therefore whatever is "fact" is conditioned by the Scientific Framework and System. Such a fact cannot standalone by itself.

This is merely to say any description - and therefore any truth-claim - is contextual and conventional. But that's trivially true and inconsequential.

"trivially true and inconsequential" What??
What we are after is the really-real and the only way we can realize the really-real is the conditional approach and never the absolute approach.
There is only reality which is conditional to humans.
I have requested you to prove to me the existence of a real fact-by-itself. You have ignored this.

Moral facts are states-of-affairs that justified empirically and philosophically as conditioned via a specific Moral Framework and System.

Nope. That every factual assertion is 'conditioned' doesn't mean that every assertion is factual. What makes an assertion factual is that it claims something about reality that may or may not be or have been the case - something that is or was REAL. And moral realists and objectivists have failed to demonstrate the real, actual existence of moral features of reality - moral things that may or may not be or have been the case. Saying 'slavery is morally wrong' is NOT like saying 'snow is white'. The word 'is' in each assertion has a completely different function - a different use.

There are three separate things: features of reality; what we believe and know about them; and what we say about them, which, classically, may be true or false. And it's a mistake to muddle them up. Moral realists claim there are moral features of reality, and theirs is the burden of proving such things exist - unmet so far, to my knowledge.

True not every assertion is factual.
But all factual assertions are 'conditioned'.
The degree of veracity of a conditioned factual assertion is dependent on the credibility of the specific FSK, where the Scientific FSK is the gold standard.
I have argued the Moral FSK is similarly and heavily dependent on facts from the Scientific FSK.

I have already justified the existence of certain examples moral facts empirically and philosophically [a "1000" times], thus their reasonable credibility next to Scientific facts.

[odysseus]

Skepdick wrote
"The very nature of...." is philosophical hogwash.

The meta-foundation of everything is some linguistic definition/description/theory or another obfuscated into such generality so as to be useless and in-actionable in practice. Language doesn't work like that.

The entire medical profession's theory of good-and-bad fits in a slogan: Primum non nocere. If doctors can live without foundations - so can philosophers.

We can describe goals, desirable and undesirable states (success and failure). We do this on case-by-case basis and by getting stuck in the particulars while we try to think of any potential harmful side-effects.

It's all best effort.

The issue isn't about our ability to access rules for ethical behavior as if they were written on stone tablets by God. Referring to it as a metaethical problem simply redirects inquiry toward what this ethical business is all about foundationally. Our actual lived affairs are complicated and entangled, and simple answers are simply not possible, not definitively, even in the simplest examples.

That ethics is very strange at the level of basic questions, is the point here. In short, consider: place a hot iron on living flesh and see the result. The ethical question, just as an example, is, what is it that prima facie prohibits me from doing this to another person? I mean, prior to "reasons why" one might do this, there is this prohibition very firmly in place and it's not simply a "best effort" affair. It is there, in the fabric of things; not a principle or just a societal necessity, but something else entirely, something, if you will, logically presupposed by principles and necessities. Logically, I say, because the very concept of the ethical rests with just this: the suffering qua suffering. It is "meta" because the badness, to use an awkward term, of having one's flesh scorched by a hot iron resists analysis, is presented as a simple "presence" that carries a prohibitive weight all by itself! It is, if you prefer this term, a kind of qualia, in the world itself, but unlike colors or sounds which are AS color or sound ethically neutral, nothing at all, really, suffering is inherently bad, an absolute that cannot be discussed (see Wittgenstein's Tractatus. He understood this)

I am, as I have said elsewhere, a moral realist because of this above. Not vis a vis the entanglements of our moral affairs, but at the basis of all ethical matter in what makes ethics, ethics.

[henry quirk]

odysseus,

https://www.libertarianism.org/publicat ... rtarianism

[odysseus]

henry quirk wrote
https://www.libertarianism.org/publicat ... rtarianism

I'll say this henry: I've read it and I find, as I have always found, libertarianism to be a deeply immoral political idea. But re. the issue at hand, facts and morality, consider, Michael Huemer writes:
Given moral realism, someone’s intuitions must be mistaken. However, we have no good reason to assume that other people are much more likely to have mistaken intuitions than we ourselves are. Therefore, pending further argument, we should withhold judgment on controversial issues where people’s intuitions diverge radically, especially when intuitions diverge along ideological lines.

Moral intuitionism does not go this way. the "intuition" is not complex. the complexity of any given situation is not intuitive but complicated, a thing of parts, and it is the entaglement with these parts that makes ethics and politics so difficult. By parts, I mean the situation, the ethical accidentals: borrow my car and you have to give it back; BUT. I owe you money and refuse to pay it back, and I did this because you ruined my chances of getting that high paying job, and on and on. This is the world of ethical problem solving. (My form of) ethical realism says these are simply facts of entanglement. The ethically real is understood by abstracting from this. It lies with the value-actualities, the bad feelings, sensations that carry their "badness" on their sleeve like a lighted match on bare flesh. When one wants to ask if ethics is objective, it is there, at the level of "core" event where one finds the philosophical answer.

The reason why moral ideas are factual is that once the embeddedness of the actual lived value experience is considered for what it is, not unlike the effort to look plainly at reason and abstracting logical form (which is how we conceive of symbolic logic), is "observed" its presence, the bad-ness of pain and the good-ness of Hagen Das is overwhelmingly clear, just not empirically demonstrable. It is, as Moore put it, a non natural property of the world.

If you want to talk about libertarianism, let me know.

[henry quirk]

well, I'm embarrassed...the link I posted was not the one I intended to post...the link I had in mind was about natural rights libertarianism as a kind of moral realism...sorry 'bout that

I can post the correct link if you like


If you want to talk about libertarianism, let me know.

sure

you say I have always found, libertarianism to be a deeply immoral political idea

which strain of libertarianism do you find immoral, and why?

me: I find all the strains of consequentialist libertarianism wrong-headed