But: There are truths that can actually be determined. The “world of words” in a legal decision is either in sync with the demonstrable facts or it is not. This can either be shown or it cannot.
For example, there are laws on the book [words in a law book] that, in any particular political jurisdiction, prescribe and proscribe particular behaviors relating to, say, owning guns and rifles.
But how is it determined which set of laws that prescribe and proscribe particular behaviors here ought to be on the book?
What distinctions can we note here?
“ There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”
However, this is an imaginative stretching of the known unknowns into an formal category.
Well, from my frame of mind, it is just common sense. Is there or is there not a seemingly inherent gap between what we think we know about something [about anything] and all that would need to be known about everything?
“What “on earth” does that mean? Let alone in linking the relevance of the “human condition” down here to “all there is” up there.”
One must measure it against such a question as: What is the practical? For example, if culpability for crime is meaningless, since there is no agent of the causation, one changes one’s view concerning incarceration and punishment.
What if what we construe as practical is only ever that which we could – or would – have construed as practical? For instance, a particular individual’s culpability – like the crime itself, like point of view about the crime itself – may well be wholly scripted into our interactions by “the immutable laws of matter”.
In fact it may well be possible that arguing over what in fact is true here is in fact already embedded in whatever set into motion the fact of matter itself. We’re all basically acting out nature’s script — one that just happens to include the kind of matter that human consciousness itself evolved into. Matter able to ponder itself as matter able to ponder itself. But only as matter was ever able to ponder itself.
And the maddening thing is that until we know for certain what is in fact true or not true here, we can only take one or another existential leap to believing that what we think we do know about it “here and now” is “for all practical purposes” what is thought to “work” for us.
What’s weird about mindful matter is that sometimes all that’s necessary is for it to believe that something is true. It doesn’t necessarily have to actually be true at all.
What facts? In what context? Understood in what particular way? As that relates to the argument in the OP.
It’s you who wrote “they are in fact true”. One must ask, what does fact mean here? Do you notice that if one called all things facts, it would mean all experience of all humans were a kind of scientific result. However, don’t we call those opinions?
There are facts we can note in a causual chain that all are able to agree on because in fact they are able to be demonstrated as in fact true. What caused Joe to be executed? He did in fact murder someone, was in fact tried and convicted for it, did in fact live in a state that permits capital punishment.
Okay, but what caused Jane to believe that capital punishment is wrong?
You either grapple with that distinction as I do or you don’t.
Instead, in making a distinction between creating a book and banning people from reading it, you prefer to go here:
So far as the “ought” judgment is thought casually, as causing the view in the judge who bans the book, it is a cause like the making of the book by the master printer. However, this whole region of causation is meaningless. Though, the human being lives in this idea.
Now, in a wholly determined universe, there would not appear to be a distinction to be made. The book will be made, the book will be banned. Both are – ontologically? teleologically? – part and parcel of the immutable laws of matter.
Unless of course I am completely misunderstanding your point here. But, if so, what caused me to? Did I have any capacity --autonomy, freedom – to not misunderstand your point?
Then this part:
“The book was always either going to be banned or not banned when whatever brought into existence the laws of matter themselves set them up as they immutably are.”
This seems derivative on the idea of causality. This “going to be” thinking implies the teleology of the idea of time. It evades what is!
What on earth does this have to do – for all practical purposes – with causation embedded in either creating the book or in banning it? It srikes me instead as a purely “intellectual contraption”.
What is “meaningful” to most of us is wanting to read a particular book when others want to ban the book and make it unavailable to read.
How is causation here to be understood from a particular point of view? Understood, say, biologically, epistemologically, ethically, ontologically, teleologically etc.? Given the manner in which this in and of itself is embedded in an explanation for why and how anything exists at all?
And then when I return to this:
Back again to everyone argeeing that this assessment must be true because the definition and the meaning that you give to the words that encompass it are understood to be the starting point for any discussion of these relationships.
Or so it certainly seems to me. It is a wholly scholastic assessment that goes nowhere near human interactions from day to day. Let alone interactions that come into conflict out in the is/ought world.
…we get this from you:
This is fanciful nonsense posing as common sense in the style of persons who claim fake flowers are more practical than living ones, for they need less care. Words name what happens. One writes things as a means of getting to what is.
Fake flowers? Is that actually what you think my points can be reduced to?
There are words used to describe the execution of Joe above. And they are either precisely in sync with the fact of the execution or they are not. Correlation and/or cause and effect here are clearly demonstrable. But what caused Jane to believe it is the wrong thing to do? Are all the variables linked here in the same manner or is the human “mind” a whole new kind of matter?
Then [of course] this:
If you refuse to respect the necessity of definitions, which make visible what is being said for all, you are not worth speaking to. One can explain nothing to fools.
Definitions. Those contraptions that many serious philosophers fall back on. Suckle on. With them we can stay up in the clouds of abstraction. Or, if we do bring them down to earth, it is only to discuss apple trees and fake flowers.