If God wants to destroy evil...

[Zarathustra]

God created everything that has been, is, and is going to be in existence. He created the Earth and the Heavens. He created the Lake of Fire in which he casts sinners. He created Good, and He created evil. Does not the old adage says "I have created you, and so can I destroy you"?

If God wanted to, couldn't He, in theory, destroy evil with no need for the battle of the apocalypse?

[spetey]

Hullo!

Otherwise, for example, racists could support their controversial claims by their own "cryptic means" to "understand" the world.

Sure, and that's true. The difference though is that I'm setting up what I believe to be acceptable premises.

Oh. The difference is that you believe your views, and you don't believe racism, so that's why it's okay to provide merely "cryptic means" to support your view but not the racist's? Please give the premises to support your claims.

Okay. You have quoted Davidson (though you know perfectly well it will drive me bonkers to pull out yet another wand you claim will do magic). Again, based on your reading of this passage (for example, the apparently nonsensical claim that "these T-sentences provide the structure for the natural laws"), I challenge your understanding of this passage.

Don't worry about how I interpret that passage. If you have questions about a specific meaning of what I said, then please ask.

Okay. What is a T-sentence (according to you)? How do T-sentences, from Davidsonian semantics, somehow magically "provide" the "structure" of the natural laws? Are you now claiming that the physical depends on the semantic, as well?

I won't repeat what I just said. The text should be treated as my words and not someone else's words.

No, they shouldn't be treated that way. They aren't your words (except the parts where you mangle the original in brackets), and (my claim is) you don't understand them. Again, watch, I'll copy and paste something I found on the internet, from Wikipedia:

• 

There. Can we treat that as "my words"? Can we just assume this proves my claim that there is no God? If the rules of the game are that you can quote any passage you like, whether you understand it or not, and then you get to count that passage as a great "reason" for whatever claim you like, then it looks like I've just won!

Please, for at least the fifth time now: either admit you are mistaken to claim that "physical possibility supervenes on logical possibility", or give your reasons for this claim and respond to my reasons against it.

If T-sentences (which provide us with what is logically possible) ...

Not shown--indeed, from what I can tell, not even sensical. Again, please define your technical terms in your words before you use them as magic wands.

... provide the structure for sentences in L (which provide us with what is physically possible) ...

Where you recognize that 'L' is a variable for any language? So for example the sentences of language L, where 'L' is Peano arithmetic--that language "provides us" with what is physically possible? And the language I'm inventing right now, consisting just of the syntactic signs {snoog, garble} (semantics available upon request)--that language, too, "provides us" with what is physically possible?

... then sentences of L reside upon (i.e., supervene) on T-sentences in that ...

Oh, "supervene on" just means "reside upon" according to you? So I supervene on my floor? And physical possibility "resides upon" logical possibility? I wasn't aware that physical possibility or sentences was a physical thing that could reside anywhere. Wait, sorry--here you are arguing that the sentences "reside upon" / "supervene on" other sentences, a different claim and still less plausible. Please, again, provide reasons to believe such an apparently nonsensical claim. (If you are being "metaphorical" and "cryptic", I remind you that they don't count as reasons until they are literal and perspicuous.)

[physical possibility] is not reducible to [logical possibility], every [physical possible event] can be paired with some [logical possibility] — that is, every [physical possible] description of an event can be paired with a [logically possible] description... This leads... [to speaking] of the [physical possible] as ‘supervening’ on the [logical possible] in a way that implies a certain dependence of [physical possible] predicates on [logical possible] predicates:

Poor, poor, Donald Davidson, just another of the dead philosophers you've caused to roll in the grave. Again, you cannot take a passage that claims A supervenes on B and assume that means that C supervenes on D for totally separate notions. Or is this a good argument?

[the tortoise] is not reducible to [the hare], every [tortoise] can be paired with some [hare] — that is, every [tortoise] description of an event can be paired with a [hare] description... This leads... [to speaking] of the [tortoise] as ‘supervening’ on the [hare] in a way that implies a certain dependence of [tortoise] predicates on [hare] predicates... predicate p supervenes on a set of predicates S ‘if and only if p does not distinguish any entities that cannot be distinguished by S’... Put more simply, [animals] that cannot be distinguished under some [tortoise] description cannot be distinguished under a [hare] description either. [constructed only by adjusting what was in Harvey's bracketed additions to the quotation previous]

Whew! I just proved tortoises supervene on hares! Good thing I understand supervenience and Davidson so well!

The articles I provided on what Davidson meant by supervenience is not shown in technical language.

'Supervenience' is technical language. It has a highly technical meaning. To support a supervenience claim requires showing certain modal facts hold. I know you don't know this--indeed it is glaringly obvious you don't know this--but it makes sense now that you hear it, right? So I must avail myself of modal notions to support or attack supervenience claims. Davidson defines and uses supervenience supposing that his reading audience will understand this highly technical notion. In your case, Davidson is mistaken.

Spetey, why are so rude like this??

Poor Harvey. Asking for reasons for claims you refuse to give up is so rude, isn't it? Gosh it's just no fun when people won't let you use any big words you like as though they magically supported your antecedent views.

Look, this time I recognize that you at least attempted to give some kind of reason for one of your outrageous claims. But I hope you see why they are not actually reasons--no better reasons than thinking tortoises supervene on hares. (Of course given your understanding of 'supervenience', you may believe that too, I don't know.)

Don't you believe that we are having a friendly discussion?

Of course, but being "friendly" in a debate does not mean letting others make any outrageous claim they like without reason or justification.

Please, stop with this kind of hostile reaction.

My last post wasn't in the least hostile. It merely asked, I think with admirable courtesy given the circumstances, for reasons. Perhaps only you can best explain why you view that as a hostile attack.

Besides, the moderators would quickly start issuing warnings to us.

I admit that I have not always behaved with perfect decorum and have sometimes, perhaps, even merited a warning (though one was never given). But my last post has no such behavior of which I'm ashamed. If the moderators issue me a warning for continually requesting reasons for your views, then so much the worse for the forum, in my view. From what I can tell, though, the moderators are as dedicated to reason-giving as I am.


spetey

[harvey1]

Okay, debate over. I didn't even finish reading the post and my blood pressure was increasing. As I said, I won't engage in unfriendly debates. Have a nice life Spetey.

[spetey]

Okay, debate over. I didn't even finish reading the post and my blood pressure was increasing. As I said, I won't engage in unfriendly debates. Have a nice life Spetey.

Thanks, you too. In the bigger picture I'm sorry to see you go, though I can't honestly say I regret it a whole lot that your style of discussion will no longer adorn this thread. I hope you can return someday with a renewed willingness to provide reasons for your claims in your own, well-understood words, and a renewed willingness to give up or amend claims for which you can't provide reasons. Though painful at first, you'll find such a process very worthwhile!

I am, meanwhile, still eager to discuss the problem of evil (preferably in everyday English) with anyone interested. I'm also still interested in whether life has meaning without a God (my claim, essentially: yes, it does).


spetey

[harvey1]

I hope you can return someday with a renewed willingness to provide reasons for your claims in your own, well-understood words, and a renewed willingness to give up or amend claims for which you can't provide reasons. Though painful at first, you'll find such a process very worthwhile!

I'm not going anywhere. Whenever someone wants to debate a subject in a friendly spirit, I will be more than happy to provide reasons within the framework of the forum rules. Take care, Spet!

[harvey1]

QED,

Davidson himself expressed regret at coming up with the example of the omniscient interpreter which he dropped in his later discussions preferring to talk about the notion of triangulation instead.

I'm not sure what Davidson regretted about the omniscient interpreter argument (OIA). It seems, though, papers have been written about this topic since it was introduced over 20 years ago. Recently, Nathaniel Goldberg wrote a paper on how the omniscient interpeter argument is a valid means to eliminate the most acceptable types of skepticism.

So, I think it is still a valid point by Davidson that an omniscient interpreter removes much of the sting of skepticism. That has little to do with my point for bringing it up with Spetey, however it's interesting how Davidson was thinking of his radical interpretation and principle of charity in these terms.

[Curious]

Ok, I'm no expert on supervenience so had to do a search on google. This is what I found at :
http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/Min ... ience.html

The notion of supervenience was first introduced into the philosophy of mind by Donald Davidson (1970):

"[M]ental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics. Such supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respect, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respect without altering in some physical respect. (p98)"

An example of supervenience is given in the relations between the acceleration, velocity, and position of an object in space. An object cannot change its acceleration without changing its velocity, and in turn, cannot change its velocity without changing its position. Thus, facts about an object's acceleration supervene on facts about an object's velocity which in turn supervene on facts about an object's position. The example of moving objects illustrates an important feature of supervenience, namely, that supervenience is transitive. Another important feature of supervenience illustrated by this example is that the supervening properties need not be identical to the properties upon which they supervene. Thus, acceleration supervenes on velocity, but is not the same thing as velocity.

The fact that supervening properties need not be identical to their subvening properties is the source of the great appeal of supervenience to contemporary philosophers of mind who have come to think that the mental cannot be identical to the physical (largely due to considerations of multiple realizability) yet want to be physicalists and thus hold on to the notion that the mental is nonetheless determined by the physical. Thus they subscribe to the thesis of psychophysical supervenience, AKA, the supervenience thesis.

The supervenience thesis states that mental properties and facts supervene on physical properties and facts. The supervenience thesis can be further unpacked as the following three theses about objects and their properties. (Please note that I use the term "object" as a place holder for the unwieldy "object, event, or state of affairs" and the term "properties" to denote extrinsic as well as intrinsic properties.)

(i) No two objects can differ in their mental properties without differing in their physical properties.

(ii) A single object cannot change its mental properties without changing its physical properties.

(iii) If, at a given time t, a single object has two different subsets of mental properties, it must have two different subsets of physical properties.

The above three corollaries to the supervenience thesis are each captured by the slogan "no mental differences without physical differences."

Variations of the supervenience can be obtained by (1) varying the modal force of the thesis and (2) by varying the "objects" compared.

Regarding (1), versions of the thesis that are to apply to objects in only a single possible world are known as 'Weak' Supervenience, whereas versions that allow for comparisons across possible worlds are known as 'Strong' Supervenience.

Regarding (2), various versions of the thesis quantify over, from smallest to largest, persons, spatial regions, or whole possible worlds, yielding 'Local', 'Regional', and 'Global' Supervenience, respectively.

Like I said, I am no expert but is this just saying in a rather long-winded manner that "things affect things"?
We could say that velocity supervenes on kinetic energy on a 1kg mass but if the direction is reversed so the velocity is -2m/s rather than the original 2m/s, the kinetic energy remains the same in both cases. The Velocity is changed but Ek remains the same. In the same way, an orbiting satellite travelling at a constant speed will essentially have the same kinetic energy but the velocity will change from positive to negative throughout it's orbit. If we have the satellite orbiting in a top bottom top rotation, rather than clockwise or anticlockwise, we could also say that the velocity is zero in a left to right direction and could then accelerate to our hearts content without affecting the velocity one bit.
What does this prove? ............bugger all!

[harvey1]

Like I said, I am no expert but is this just saying in a rather long-winded manner that "things affect things"?
We could say that velocity supervenes on kinetic energy on a 1kg mass but if the direction is reversed so the velocity is -2m/s rather than the original 2m/s, the kinetic energy remains the same in both cases. The Velocity is changed but Ek remains the same.

That's my point. Supervenience can be construed along the lines of Kim's usage which refers to metaphysical worlds and dealing with modalities and all of that, OR it can be construed in the way in which it was originally introduced into philosophy through Davidson. Btw, I found it amusing when it was mentioned that Davidson knew how the term was being defined in terms of possible worlds. He introduced it into philosophy without reference to possible worlds!

[spetey]

Hey Curious! Thanks for asking about this tricky notion--you're certainly living up to your name. And it looks like a good article you've found on supervenience. For a more in-depth take, you could try this article.

Like I said, I am no expert but is this just saying in a rather long-winded manner that "things affect things"?

No. I guess you could say is a more precise way to capture the intuition that some "things depend on (other) things", but this doesn't always mean causally (by "affecting" something). Notice that in the case of velocity and acceleration, for example, it's not exactly that the velocity causes the acceleration--if anything, it's the other way around, and yet it's the acceleration that supervenes on the velocity. And in the case of the mental and the physical, most people don't think (exactly) that the physical state (like, say, C-fibers firing) causes the mental state (say, pain). And most don't think the physical state just is the mental state, because it seems a Martian could be in pain even if it didn't have C-fibers. Most think that (most) mental kind states, like pain, are functional states that depend on their physical instantiations (in humans, we once thought it was C-fibers firing) without being (type-wise) identical to them. What exactly do we mean when we say one "depends" on the other? Enter the more precise notion of supervenience.

Here's another example of supervenience: many think that the ethical supervenes on the physical. In other words, if there is something ethically different about a situation, there must also be something physically different about the situation. You couldn't look at two completely specified circumstances identical in every physical detail but reasonably call one "good" and the other "bad". But the physical doesn't cause or obviously entail the ethical. There's just some kind of dependence relation there.

What does this prove? ...bugger all!

By itself the concept of supervenience doesn't prove anything. (And thanks for pointing it out!) It's just a useful conceptual tool for capturing certain kinds of dependence relations. Similarly, the concept of a "Hamiltonian" in quantum dynamics doesn't prove anything. It's just a handy technical term for specific kinds of discussions.

In particular, supervenience doesn't somehow prove that God could both choose and not choose to stop the 2004 tsunami! (Indeed nothing could prove a contradiction.) That's why I've advocated dropping the whole notion. I would much rather focus on the Problem of Evil in everyday language. It's a perfectly accessible problem!


spetey

[harvey1]

For a different perspective of Davidson's supervenience concept, I suggest reading this published philosopher:

As I see it, the difference between Kim’s approach and Davidson’s lies in the items supervenience is thought to connect. Kim’s formulations of supervenience connect properties, which he takes to be the ontological building blocks of events. In general then, Kim treats supervenience as a metaphysical thesis about the distribution of properties in possible worlds. By contrast, Davidson has little tolerance for the idea that events should be analyzed in terms of property exemplifications. Given Davidson’s reluctance to endorse properties, he prefers to think of supervenience as a relation between predicates. If we construe Davidson’s thesis in this way, it is quite different from Kim’s. Far from a metaphysical thesis, Davidson’s is a thesis about our use of language, about the logical relations between the application of certain words. This is corroborated by the following passage where Davidson tries to clarify what his supervenience thesis should be taken to express:

The notion of supervenience, as I have used it, is best thought of as a relation between a predicate and a set of predicates in a language: a predicate p is supervenient on a set of predicates S if for every pair of objects such that p is true of one and not of the other there is a predicate of S that is true of one and not of the other.

[Curious]

...No. I guess you could say is a more precise way to capture the intuition that some "things depend on (other) things", but this doesn't always mean causally (by "affecting" something). Notice that in the case of velocity and acceleration, for example, it's not exactly that the velocity causes the acceleration--if anything, it's the other way around, and yet it's the acceleration that supervenes on the velocity.

I edited my post at the same time as you and Harvey replied so I think maybe you didn't see my "appendment". Acceleration and velocity are dependent upon perspective and so velocity and acceleration could remain zero on a top bottom top rotation while changing for the observer of a clockwise rotation. So where does perspective come into it all? The characteristics of A could be vastly different when observed from point C or D and might not necessarily supervene on B in the way that the article states. I refer to the slogan from the link you gave me
“there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference”. While it might in most cases be true that velocity supervenes on Ek, it is not always the case.

... That's why I've advocated dropping the whole notion. I would much rather focus on the Problem of Evil in everyday language. It's a perfectly accessible problem!


spetey

My brain hurts so consider it dropped