Peter Holmes wrote: ↑January 28th, 2020, 5:43 am
Okay - and our decision to adopt that goal is subjective. We always want to justify our moral decisions - and equal treatment for everyone is a rational goal. More to the point, less-than-universal application of a rule or goal would be morally inconsistent. But I think we're agreeing here.
The Equal Agency postulate does not demand "equal treatment" in the popular sense; that is a moral principle and thus would beg the question as a postulate in a moral theory, the aim of which is to rationally derive moral principles from non-moral facts. It only stipulates that all agents within the scope of the theory have the same status and that any principles or rules developed apply in the same way to all agents.
It is a postulate, however, and thus is assumed
a priori, without argument. Hence it could be rejected
a priori. Elitists, egoists, and perhaps others would and could reject it.
Give that some thought. How would you know that some asserted state of affairs is independent of anyone's opinion, except via the method I mentioned?
I think the choice of words here is very important. A state-of-affairs is completely independent of anyone's opinion, so the way you put it is confused. The epistemological question as to how we know a state-of-affairs obtains (is the case) is a separate matter - and I didn't mean to imply that the methodology you describe doesn't or can't work. It patently does work - and it has nothing to do with language. My point is about the different and separate operation of linguistic (or other) descriptions of states-of-affairs - the muddled idea of correspondence theories of truth.
You can't separate the (conventionally) "ontological" state-of-affairs from the epistemological question. We're not entitled to claim any state-of-affairs exists in the absence of knowledge of it. Until there is knowledge there is no ontology. We can, of course, speculate about possible ontologies, hypothesize them, to our heart's content without any knowledge.
BTW, the theory of truth I adopt is not the correspondence theory (or, at least, the "classical" version). It is the "semantic theory" developed by Tarski, Kripke, and others. "A proposition
P in language
L is true IFF
s." That proposition is asserted in a meta-language,
L1, and the truth conditions
s are spelled out in that language.
There is no structural "correspondence" between a state-of-affairs and the proposition (or strictly speaking, the sentence) asserting it. The proposition merely informs a hearer, by virtue of a common understanding of the terms employed, as to what observations to make to confirm the state-of-affairs asserted.
Virtually all "facts" that we believe we know originate in some proposition. Henry Cavendish asserted that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. He also described a method of verifying that assertion --- he set forth some public truth conditions for his assertion. That proposition only became accepted as a "fact" after other chemists, following the verification procedure Cavendish described (and others discovered later), confirmed his proposition.
Again, this conflates the two different meanings of the word 'fact' - of which you seem to be conscious. Cavendish discovered a state-of-affairs, not a proposition. To say most of what we believe or know about reality originates in a proposition is patently false. And the fact that we've been content to state this falsehood as a truth demonstrates the potency of the myth of propositions.
Cavendish's knowledge of the composition of water was gained through direct experience. For everyone else, except a few other chemists, it was acquired via a proposition.
Again, I agree with your description of the nature of belief and knowledge. My objection is to the assumption that language is constitutive or primary or necessary in believing and knowing things. Why should it be?
Oh, it isn't. Clearly many animals know things (my cat knows what the sounds of a can opener and the chirping of a bird mean), and they have no language. But the knowledge we each acquire through direct experience ("knowledge by acquaintance," per Russell), is but a small part of our overall knoweldge and
no part of our "common knowledge" --- the knowledge of states-of-affairs we transmit in schools, discuss in forums, and argue about. That is all "knowledge by description."
I need no proposition, or any language, to see --- and thus know --- that snow is white. But I do need one if I wish to communicate that knowledge to someone else.
There are indeed judgments to be made. But they are not moral judgments; they are pragmatic ones --- guesses, even --- because the full consequences of all the available options are rarely known in advance. But some options can be ruled out in advance, because they thwart the goal prima facie or violate the Equal Agency postulate.
Again, I largely agree with you here. The problem is always that ruling actions in or out in advance is a matter of judgement, precisely because we can never know all consequences - if only because of the problem of induction. Prima facie reasoning can't be deductive.
I agree. But that, due to inadequate information, a definitive answer cannot be given at a given time does not render a proffered answer subjective. The truth conditions for the proposition are still public, and the information needed to confirm it may well become available in due course (alas, often after-the-fact).
- By Sushan