A deductive argument is one where the conclusion is entailed in the premises. Like the pythagorean theorem. You know about theorems right?
If a=b
and b=c
then a=c.
If ecm is a kook,
and all kooks are retarded
then ecm is retarded.
See what I mean?
I actually didn’t make that up. But it sure as hell works.
Yeah but you did it after you conceded defeat, so nobody gives a fuck. Go post it in Philosophy, and you can have entirely new people laugh at you instead of me and MrR.
So are you prepared to explain what ‘premise’ and ‘conclusion’ and ‘entail’ and ‘kook’ and ‘=’ all mean? Like 10 times? Cause that’s where that road leads.
I dunno man I’d probably go over there and laugh at him again.
You guys are still pricks… this thread is still going. I don’t accept that deductive arguments cannot be sound, that’s my own private definition for a deductive argument, you guys are lazy. I made a sound argument where none of the premises are assertions (they can all be deduced from reality), and deduced from each other. I found a way to turn every assertion into a deductive argument… why aren’t you debating the point?
Oh yeah? Well I made an inference where none of the definitions were premises, all the premises were entailments, and invented a way to turn all modal operators into noetic structures. Come at me, bro.
What are you trying to say to me here? Vagueness is a form of aggression. I looked up these definitions and it looks like this sentence contradicts itself. When I looked up noetics, I was spammed with christian apologetics sites, I didn’t even get wikipedia.
lolololol
…a trivial point (you seem to be doing too much of that lately). We can always be talking about “brick A” rather than “a brick”.
If I define “Brick A” as “the larger object in my right hand at this moment”, are you saying that I can’t prove that it exists?
So I can’t make a sound argument about unicorns because they aren’t real?
Emm… how do you decide if something is or isn’t real before you bother to construct an argument about whether it is real?
So there can be no sound argument to deduce whether a premise is true?
P1: I weigh over 300lbs
P2: I weight less than John
P3: John weighs 200lbs
P4: 200lbs is less than 300lbs
Conclusion: One of the premises is not true.
Isn’t that a valid sound argument?
Yet one of the premises is untrue.
You seem to be demanding knowledge of what is true or not before any deductive argument can be made. The problem is that it is deductive arguments that resolve most of what is or is not true.
I didn’t want to get into it, but…
Despite what you probably find in dictionaries concerning realness, something being true means that it meets the measure. A statement can be true or not. The course of a ship and be true or not. Or the intentions of a friend. “True” only means “real” in specific cases. Objects are not true or false although their measurements can be.
If I declare that a “gun” is any mechanical device that fires bullets and premise that John used a mechanical device to fire bullets, then I can deduce that John used a gun. From that deduction and the premise that something has to exist for John to be using it, I can then deduce that the gun John used exists(ed).
Isn’t that a sound existential argument concerning a concrete object?
Ah, fuck. You’re too much. 
Not trivial at all, because you can stipulate an exhaustive definition of ‘a brick’, but not brick A.
You can convince people that it exists, and you can make them certain that it exists, but you won’t be doing that with a sound deductive argument, you’ll be doing it by showing them the brick. I mean, what’s your argument?
1.)“The larger object in my right hand at this moment is Brick A.”
2.)
Brick A exists.
So what do you have for me as a premise 2 that isn’t circular, a tautology (from which nothing can be concluded), or an inference? I mean, this would be cool if you had it- I’d have to narrow down my thesis to things that have a certain amount of inaccessibility like God and figures from the past, which would be good. But I dunno what you’re gonna use for 2 yet, so we’ll see. And of course you’re relying on me not caring about bricks. If you tried to define “God” as the large thing in your hand, or if I had some reason to not want to believe in brick A, I’d just call you definition baloney as it tells me literally nothing meaningful about bricks or brick A other than you’re about to attempt to define it into existence.
You could make a sound counterfactual argument about them like you could anything. And you could make an analytic argument that is true no matter what and just plug 'unicorn' in for one of the variables in the same way that you could plug anything in for the variables.
Inference or direct perception most generally. Or argument- but it would be an inductive argument where you’re looking for cogency, not soundness.
Not one that’s an existential claim about a concrete object, no. All sorts of other premises can be deduced. “If a = b then b =a” can probably be deduced if for some reason it’s not immediately apparent.
Yeah, technically it isn't. Concluding that one of the premises is false is one of the ways you disprove a deductive argument, or show that you don't actually have a deductive argument. You'd probably want to take that to Philosophy and see how a few people parse it, but what you're listing as the conclusion isn't the conclusion of a deductive argument, it's the explanation for why the argument is unsound.
I disagree. At least, not with regards to things that people actually need to investigate or reflect on to discover the truth of. Deduction is mainly there to remind us of what we already ought to know by nature. It very rarely reveals anything.
Yeah that’s a great argument in Texas. Deductively sound, let’s say. Now you fly to Micronesia where everybody uses a slingshot. Slingshots are mechanical devices, and the projectiles they fire are indeed called bullets. You present your argumnent and of course everybody replies , “Well, not necessarily, it could have been a slingshot.” So what’s your reply?
“Yeah, but I DECREE that everything that is a mechanical device that fires bullets is a gun, and so that includes slingshots, and so I’m still right!” What kind of ‘correctness’ is that? You aren’t saying anything about the real world anymore, and what’s more, you’re the only one who thinks you’re right and who accepts your definition here in Micronesia, so in what sense did you prove anything?
Or maybe you accept that your argument is deductively sound in Texas but not in Micronesia?
Or maybe you try to argue them out of calling sling projectiles bullets and insist that a real bullet has to be fired by a primer-and-charge mechanism?
That third option is probably your best bet, but how do you do it? The micronesians have been calling sling bullets sling bullets for a thousand years, and what with recent advancements in magnetic projectiles, the folks in Texas might not agree with you soon either.
It's an argument that there is at least one mechanical device that propells bullets. It could have been a handguns, rifle, bazooka, slingshot, railguns, shotgun and...ehh...maybe crossbow but let's say that's a corner case. With at least a couple of things on that list, experts would meet you with a resounding 'hell no' if you tried to claim it was a gun. So no, what you've shown is that there is a particular trait (being a mechanical device that propells bullets) that is instantiated at least once...but it could be instantiated by any number of things.
My point was merely this…
I was merely pointing out that all statements have words and all words are arguments, therefore all statements have arguments. I decided to try a different approach, because I was getting so pissed off that you kept saying you weren’t making an argument, so I invented a way to turn ALL statements (including assertions) into arguments (in theorem form) to get you to shut up. So James can try his approach, I used my approach, I decided not to debate you on your own turf Uccisore, I decided to turn it into an argument, all assertions into arguments, to get around this trick you’re playing with words.
No. You are arguing with my declared definition. I don’t care what other people might call what is in John’s hand or what they want to call a “gun”. I declared, in my argument what I meant when I used the word “gun”. And from there on, I DEDUCED that such a concrete object existed.
I made a sound existential argument concerning a concrete object (twice).
Game over.
My technique, to be a little clearer…
Argument to me is opposing views, since a different word can be used than the one that was used, technically, all words are arguments. (choosing which one to use)… I took a meta-analysis, and said the same thing about statements, that you can use one statement over another (an argument), therefor on a meta-analysis, all statements are arguments. That was my point. Seem absurd to you?
I was told arguments need reasoning… the reasoning in this instance is the word or statements existential value, that it exists.
I like it. I like it for a few reasons- 1.) pinpoints a particular object fairly well, which was my major point all along. It doesn't matter how much is in your hand, the larger object is always going to be singular. It doesn't say anything useful *about* the object, could be a carrot or a squirrel or anything, but using 'larger' with a location gets around that. 2 Is a premise that's on the other person to deny- if they deny it the argument fails of course, and you have no recourse because it's out of your scope to say otherwise, but it's a very obvious premise and as long as you're dealing with an even slightly honest person, you're in good shape. You have to presume good faith when you're working with somebody else so I don't think that's a flaw in your argument at all. Of course 3 is straight up false as people see and feel things that don't exist with some regularity. Now sure, you could say that even things like phantom pains and illusions exist as perceptions to try and salvage that, but in those cases the perception isn't [i]in your hand[/i], so the that part of the premise becomes an inference.
So, other than 3 being false and thus the argument relying on inference, the only other problem I see with it is you needing to find some way to use existence as a predicate such that premise 1 doesn't make your argument circular. But I think that's just a problem with wording. If you changed 1.) to "Suppose there is a largest object in my right hand at this moment. Call it Brick A," then you're no longer assuming your conclusion whether or not existence is a predicate. Of course you'd have to do something with 2 as well- can't assert that I'm seeing and feeling the larger object if we're just supposing it's in your hand. Maybe "You see and feel an object in my right hand, and don't see or feel any larger object." Of course that wording makes the flaw in 3 quite a bit more obvious, as most people at that point will be reminded that just because they see or feel something doesn't guarentee that it's there, and certainly doesn't guarentee that there isn't some unseen and unfelt larger something. So maybe come up with your own alternate wording for 1, or work out how it's ok for existence to be a predicate in your conclusion, but not implied in premise 1.
The other thing that's nice about your argument is that it's completely inapplicable to God, since you had to use an object that was utterly non-estranged from the people involved, and is defined precisely through qualities God can't possess.
Well, take a look at the Cosmological argument. Let's say all things considered it really does show that there was a first cause. The problem with the cosmological argument is that it [i]purports[/i] to show that God exists, and it certainly does not- the First Cause could be an explosion or some other natural phenomenon or a being with a bunch of other qualities that would exclude him from being considered God by basically everybody. So the cosmological argument doesn't show that God exists, it show that a First Cause does. Your argument doesn't show that a gun exists, it shows that a mechanical devices that propells bullets exists. Ordinarily, that wouldn't be sufficient- ordinarily since any number of things with very little in common could fit your conclusion, you wouldn't be showing the existence of anything concrete- you'd merely be showing the instantiation of a trait that any number of concrete objects could have. But, one of the traits that you established about this gun is that it [i]was used by John[/i].
John used a mechanical device to fire bullets.
A mechanical device to fire bullets is a gun.
John used a gun.
John can’t use something that doesn’t exist.
The gun John used existed.
Good thing about this argument is it doesn’t have the incorrect premise about sense perception in the first one. Another good thing about it is ‘use a gun’ still pinpoints the object pretty well, as ‘In my right hand’ did in the first argument. 2 is false, I gave you a perfectly good example of a counter example to 2. But you don’t need 2 anyway since, as you just said, you don’t care what the object is called.
John used a mechanical device to fire bullets.
John can’t use something that doesn’t exist
The mechanial device to fire bullets John used existed.
Now I don’t know why you didn’t just go this way with it. I think the problem maybe is that the extra steps where you define a gun so you can use that word instead of ‘mechanical device to fire bullets’ in the conclusion makes it harder to see that this is a circular argument. I don’t see any way 1 isn’t assuming it’s conclusion. The classic thought experiment against existence as a predicate applies here: Imagine a gun. Now imagine that same gun, but it exists. If you believe as I do that the second imagining is in all ways identicle to the first, then your argument is unavoidably circular. Existence not being a predicate is a little controversial, if you do think existence is a predicate and want to argue for that, go ahead as I think thats the only way to save the argument.
In the first argument, you could get around that by turning the first premise into a supposition. If you try that here you get
~1. “Suppose John used a mechanical device to fire bullets, call it Gun.”
2. John can’t use something that doesn’t exist.
Gun exists.
Of course what’s missing in this case is anything that confirms the truth of ~1. In your first argument you had the incorrect premise about sense perception. Here you don’t even have that. You’d merely suppose that John used Gun, then conclude it exists on the basis of nothing. So that’s out.
So I dunno about Game Over, that's a little too 'Ecmandu' for me, but yeah if you want to establish that existence is a predicate, then you certainly have an argument going for you- in cases where an object being used for a purpose is non-controversial, and if existence is not a predicate, you can from "X was used" to the existence of X deductively and non-circularly.
To map this back onto theism, a parallel argument would be an atheist agreeing with you that God did something (while being an atheist), you pointing out that God couldn't do that thing unless He existed, and the atheist saying "Oh snap, that's right!" and becoming a theist. Or, if you insist on the definitional part being relevant, the atheist agrees with you that something did something, you call that something "God" and the atheist has no objection to this, and then you point out that God couldn't do something unless he existed, and the atheist goes "Oh snap that's right!" an becomes a theist. That's the sort of situation you've illustrated. Given all that, I'm still very comfortable that the original challenge- i.e., that deductive arguments for the existence of God are impossible because the definitions are imprecise- is either still intact, or else I can salvage it with a bit of tweaking. It is, after all, still true that all (a)theistic arguments only succeed in establishing the impossibility/necessity of some trait God is alleged to have, and that this trait is never sufficient to define God in a way that guarentees we aren't talking about something nothing like God- which has been my point all along. Your first argument even if it was sound tells us nothing at all about the brick besides it's location, and your second argument calls things guns that obviously aren't guns and/or establishes nothing at all about the thing to be proven other than deriving it's existence from [i]stipulating that it acts in the world[/i]. So I can certainly reword my thesis in a way that accounts for the two new examples of it you've given, even if there's something not quite right about the impossibility of certain deductions.
Good though, I don’t think anyone is going to do better.
Ucci, you have mentioned too many small issues with which I would disagree. Most of which seem to be about the possibility of someone disagreeing with a premise or statement. Your assertion was that a sound argument could not be made. It was not that an argument could not be made that everyone would recognize as sound.
You stated that (3) in the first case was false. Actually it is not. And we could argue. But it doesn’t really matter if it was true or not because it certainly could have been one of many possible true statements that led to a true conclusion. There is nothing preventing such a construct from being what even you would call “sound”. Although the truth is that whether you think one of the premises is not true does not in itself mean that it wasn’t a truly sound argument.
Just because an argument is sound, is no reason to expect everyone to agree that it is. And perhaps no one at all will see how sound it really was. The soundness of an argument is an objective concern independent of what anyone might know of it.
Concerning that statement (3), you stated that people see and feel things that do not exist. That is false. That never happens. They see or feel something and they imagine that they saw and felt something particular. Perhaps they were wrong. But if the thing truly did not exist, they most certainly did not truly see or feel it. They saw and felt their imagination (which does exist). The premise was, “you DO see and feel.…” It was not “you think that maybe you see and feel something sort of like what you think that maybe possibly be in what seems like my hand on a good day”.
Premise (1) makes nothing circular. Where did you imagine that? (1) is a declaration of definition. It is beyond refutation. But where is there any circling? And I don’t think that I want to be placing “suppose” in any statement considering that you demand true premises and conclusions.
Aquinas’ cosmological argument expressly declares the definition of the “God” that he is referring to. He states it in the manner, "And that is what we call ‘God’".
You might (most probably) have a different definition of “God”. Many people do. In that case, he wasn’t proving YOUR concept of “God”, but merely his own (and accepted by the RCC). If any one of them can be proven then such would be a case for proving “God”. Perhaps there are many concepts of “God” that cannot be proven. That would not negate all of those that can be proven. If you can prove even one (without someone faking the belief in it), a proof of THAT God has been given. No one has claimed to be able to prove every possible concept of God to be real.
There are other small issues, but I can’t see anything at this point that disqualifies either of the proposed arguments (and they were not expressly designed to be perfect examples) from being exactly what your theorem stated could not exist.
But at this point, we are where Ecmandu was trying to get to (but in the wrong way). You have now presented deductive arguments concerning the existence of my existential arguments. By your own assertion, all of your arguments must not be sound.
Thus by your own theorem, you have presented no sound argument against my sound deductive arguments. 
One cannot win a debate in favor of the position that a debate cannot be won. 
I worked for a guy who did just that… he bought a bunch of glamour models DDs and put them under contract to work exclusively for him, but no kids in Africa starved in the process.
He went on to have a nervous breakdown, sell his magazine and TV production company for multi-millions, and is now finding himself… he threw the best after-show parties ever
To recap my argument… (James informed me that I use language in a peculiar way that might turn people off or cause them to laugh at me) So I’m trying to use it straight forward as possible…
My point was merely this…
I was merely pointing out that all statements have words and all words are arguments, therefore all statements have arguments. I decided to try a different approach, because I was getting so pissed off that you kept saying you weren’t making an argument, so I invented a way to turn ALL statements (including assertions) into arguments (in theorem form) to get you to shut up. So James can try his approach, I used my approach, I decided not to debate you on your own turf Uccisore, I decided to turn it into an argument, all assertions into arguments, to get around this trick you’re playing with words.
My technique, to be a little clearer…
Argument to me is opposing views, since a different word can be used than the one that was used, technically, all words are arguments. (choosing which one to use)… I took a meta-analysis, and said the same thing about statements, that you can use one statement over another (an argument), therefor on a meta-analysis, all statements are arguments. That was my point. Seem absurd to you?
I was told arguments need reasoning… the reasoning in this instance is the word or statements existential value, that it exists.
I was told: “Because the word, ‘good’ exists…” - can be an argument.
But the word itself, “good”, can never be an argument all by itself.
I replied: The existence of the words is demonstrated by our reading them to even engage in the discourse, so I don’t see how it can’t be an argument, it’s a theorem of discourse, testable by anyone, the counterpoint being that we can read arguments without words. The challenge was to make a sound existential argument from his assertions. So I just made his assertions into an existential argument.
And I disagree with that take anyways… the word good is an argument so much as there are other words that could potentially replace it, which was my initial point.
All statements have words
All words have other words that can replace them
Opposing entities are arguments
If, Opposing entities are entities where one can be exchanged for the other
If, Opposing entities are arguments
If, All words are opposing entities to other words
Then, All words are arguments
If, All statements have words
Then, All statements have arguments
Or you could substitute word for statement itself and say:
If, All statements have opposing entities to other statements
Then, All statements are arguments
If, we need existents to formulate discourse
If, words are used to formulate discourse
Then, words are existents
Read above steps to determine that words and statements are existential arguments.
Thus, if someone says that their statement is not an existential argument, they are making a false statement.
This thread is still going…
A sound argument is one in which the premises are true. Your first argument has a false premise, your second argument is circular unless existence is a predicate, which is far too controversial to base an argument around. Even if existence is a predicate it establishes something something that can't be applied to theistic arguments.
Then why did you fail? If you've been reading this thread (and God knows I don't blame you if you haven't) then you know that [i]disagreement about the truth of the premises and the definition of the conclusions has been my entire point[/i]. Your solution is to declare you simply don't care if the premises are true or how other people define the conclusions, you have an argument that works in your own head and nobody elses, therefore QED? I don't think so.
If you use a controversial premise in a deductive argument, you have to establish the truth of that premise in order for the argument to amount to much. Let’s take this approach to theism. Here’s an argument that mirrors exactly what you did in the ‘gun’ argument:
P1: An all knowing, all loving eternal being created the universe.
P2: All knowing, all loving eternal beings are called God.
3 (on P1 and P1) The Being described in P1 is God.
P4: If God didn’t exist, he couldn’t have created the universe,
God exists.
That is exactly what you’ve done in your second argument- you stipulated something nobody would accept without argument, then added a trivial bit to the end to make it appear as though you argued for something. If it was just that simple, why didn’t Aquinas think of it?
And their imagination would not be in your hand.
That wasn’t the premise. The premise was “You see and feel the larger object in my hand.” You know, the thing your argument purports to demonstrate the existence of? If you aren’t allowing for the obvious fact that people see and feel things that don’t exist sometimes (and you should, because anybody who reads your argument will question this), then you’re simply assuming your conclusion here. Unless you want to argue conclusively that existence is a predicate.
It is not. It declares that there is in fact something in your hand, which is the very thing you seek to demonstrate. I changed it to a supposition because in that case, the object being in your hand isn't essential to your argument, as you don't actually use the fact that it's in your hand to draw your conclusion.
Right, and that's why it fails. You have two options here- either Aquinas really thinks that God is nothing more than the First Cause and is taking the word for his diety and attributing it to such a vaguery, OR, Aquinas believes that God is all sorts of things- the Being who parted the Red Sea for Moses, omnibenevolent, had a hand in the whole "Jesus" thing, etc, and is thus making a [i]massive inductive leap[/i] to conclude that he's established the existence of God as he understands it merely by establishing the necessity of one of his qualities.
Not at all. The RCC’s definition must go much further than that.
The necessity of a lone trait that a being that could be ANYTHING from an explosion to a person to a mathematical principle is clearly not proving the existence of a concrete object. Just because you take “whatever thing happens to have the property of being the first cause” and give it a proper name doesn’t mean you’ve demonstrated the existence of anything in particular.
One of them is circular and one of them uses a false premise (and might also be circular). Both of them try to prove something fatuous by using a premise that nobody who didn't already agree with the conclusion would accept as true. That any argument for (or against) the existence of God has to do something like that [i]has been position from the start[/i], stated over and over again: that these arguments can't be sound because of the [i]choice of premises[/i] and the [i]definition of the conclusion[/i]. Since you bizarrely reject the 'true premises' aspect of sound arguments, you really didn't have an ability to interact with my point from the start. I don't think the cosmological argument is bad deductive syntax, I didn't need a lesson in deductive syntax from you; I think the cosmological agument fails to demonstrate the existence of anything fair people would call "God". I don't think all deductive versions of the PoE fail because of bad argument syntax either (though as it turns out the most well known ones do); I think they fail because they use definitions of 'powerful' and 'evil' that can't possibly enjoy widespread acceptance.
Your aguments exist, they just aren’t sound, or else fail to address my position in this thread.