Need help: Really struggling with relativism right now

[Vic_Taltrees_UK]

… meaningless to say that a quark (or a dog or a smell) is true, or that a quark/dog/smell is the Truth. The word ‘true’ means “being in accordance with the actual state or conditions; conforming to reality or fact; not false”. So only statements about a thing can be true or false, not the thing itself. Similarly ‘contradiction’ is about statements about things, it’s not a property that a quark/dog/smell can possess. …

The fact of a thing can be true. Perhaps this is what is sometimes paraphrased, in this type of sentence, as simply “a thing”. I knew what was meant by saying that the quark was true. It is measurable, describable and the like which are things that point to its being true as fact.

 

[inocente]

The fact of a thing can be true. Perhaps this is what is sometimes paraphrased, in this type of sentence, as simply “a thing”. I knew what was meant by saying that the quark was true. It is measurable, describable and the like which are things that point to its being true as fact.

I think it’s still the case that no one has been able to isolate a quark, and it may be that quarks can only exist together in groups, and not separate. So the existence of isolated quarks is not a fact. In any event, all scientific knowledge is provisional, as it’s based on inference.

But even then, I googled “a quark is true” and got no hits. No hits either for “a dog is true” or “a smell is true”. So I doubt anyone has ever said such in real life, as it doesn’t even parse, but by all means cite links to people saying “a quark is true” and prove me wrong .

 

[SimmieKay]

My understanding is that paraconsistent logic was developed to supplement, not replace, traditional logic. For example where traditional logic runs of of steam with a contradiction in a moral dilemma, paraconsistent logic may (or may not) help focus on the exact nature of the contradiction.

Certainly one could use paraconsistent logic to address moral dilemmas.

However, I personally don’t think that is a good use of paraconsistent logic. I am not convinced there are any true moral dilemmas. Certainly, occasionally there are different questions in morality where we don’t know the right answer - while the Church offers us copious guidance on moral issues, she has never said to have the answer to every conceivable moral question. But the fact that we don’t know the answer to a difficult case, or that faithful Catholics (even leading moral theologians) disagree on the answer to it, doesn’t mean that no answer exists, or that multiple possible answers are simultaneously correct. It simply means we don’t know. “We don’t know whether A or not-A, therefore A and not-A” is not a very good argument, even for someone like me who is willing to accept that “A and not-A” is very occasionally true (for a small selection of As).

Even for someone who isn’t a Catholic (or a Christian) - while they will surely disagree at some points with the Church’s moral teachings, I still don’t see how they can have a good reason to jump from moral dilemmas (which could just be a result of our limited moral knowledge) to moral dialetheism.

Simon

 

[inocente]

Certainly one could use paraconsistent logic to address moral dilemmas.

However, I personally don’t think that is a good use of paraconsistent logic. I am not convinced there are any true moral dilemmas. Certainly, occasionally there are different questions in morality where we don’t know the right answer - while the Church offers us copious guidance on moral issues, she has never said to have the answer to every conceivable moral question. But the fact that we don’t know the answer to a difficult case, or that faithful Catholics (even leading moral theologians) disagree on the answer to it, doesn’t mean that no answer exists, or that multiple possible answers are simultaneously correct. It simply means we don’t know. “We don’t know whether A or not-A, therefore A and not-A” is not a very good argument, even for someone like me who is willing to accept that “A and not-A” is very occasionally true (for a small selection of As).

Even for someone who isn’t a Catholic (or a Christian) - while they will surely disagree at some points with the Church’s moral teachings, I still don’t see how they can have a good reason to jump from moral dilemmas (which could just be a result of our limited moral knowledge) to moral dialetheism.

Simon

You say you’re not convinced there are any true moral dilemmas. Suppose an airliner has been hijacked, and although the hijackers say they want to land at the city airport, it’s possible they will at the last minute fly it into the city center sky scrapers.

You have to decide the right thing to do: shoot down the plane, potentially slaughtering innocent passengers for nothing, or take no action, potentially letting the hijackers kill the passengers and more on the ground. I think anyone would find that a true dilemma. At least, I’d hope the decision would be agonizing even for someone with 100 PhD’s in ethics. If new systems of logic could help make better decisions in such situations, can’t see a problem. Although I too am skeptical they can.

 

[SimmieKay]

You say you’re not convinced there are any true moral dilemmas. Suppose an airliner has been hijacked, and although the hijackers say they want to land at the city airport, it’s possible they will at the last minute fly it into the city center sky scrapers.

You have to decide the right thing to do: shoot down the plane, potentially slaughtering innocent passengers for nothing, or take no action, potentially letting the hijackers kill the passengers and more on the ground. I think anyone would find that a true dilemma. At least, I’d hope the decision would be agonizing even for someone with 100 PhD’s in ethics. If new systems of logic could help make better decisions in such situations, can’t see a problem. Although I too am skeptical they can.

It is a dilemma in the sense that a person can experience grave doubts about what is the right moral answer. I’m not saying there are not difficult moral questions where we don’t know the answer.

What I am saying, is it is not a dilemma in an absolute sense. It’s status as a dilemma is a product of a lack of moral knowledge on our part, not a property of absolute moral reality. All moral questions have answers, even if we don’t know what they are.

Mere lack of knowledge on our part is not a good reason to invoke paraconsistent logic. “We don’t know whether A or not-A, therefore A and not-A” is a bad argument. It is different from say the liar paradox (A=“This sentence is false”), where our reasons to believe that “A and not-A” are not based on any lack of knowledge about A.

Simon

 

[John_Martin]

People who face moral dilemmas are trying to guess at the “right thing to do”.

But we were given the theological virtues at our Baptism and Confirmation, not an encyclopedia of correct choices.

There is no moral dilemma when you face whatever you are facing and choose, “I am going to do my doing virtuously”. So, whether I disarm a hijacker or if I take him to the airport, either way I will do what I do virtuously rather than from fear of dying or from fear of making a mistake or fear of the hijacker.

God’s sanctifying gift to us, what makes us good and our works good, are the Virtues - that is all that He understands that we need to be “moral”. So, let’s use them and do all our doings virtuously, let’s literally use what He prescribes to end our uncertainty.

 

[HelenRose]

Logic used for evil?
Logis worshiped as *a God?
*
I’ve never seen or heard of anyone doing such a thing. You know people who do this?

.

Follow the logic of the absence of a rational creator and leave everything to chance.

There is no God.
Because there is no God the Law of Nature is the only reasonable law.
Good and Evil do not exist in nature.
A shark is no more nor less evil than a cockroach, kitten or human being.
Life is a struggle for The Survival of the Fittest.

Therefore the destruction of the unfit is a reasonable concept.
Therefore the killing of inferior races, the infirm, and the useless will create a race of superior “fit” men and women.

Sound familiar?

 

[Wyrd]

Ben, you remind me of myself in college. This is a hard thing to carry. One thing is certain, and that is that this struggle is having an adverse effect on you. Perhaps it is best to just table it for 1 or 2 weeks, get some exercise, shake up your routine, etc.
Focus on peace, focus on tranquility, find the things that set you into a state of flow

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology

If you aren’t happy then something is wrong, but not with the world or with you, but with the meaning you assign to that which you are experiencing. Find joy.

youtu.be/f77SKdyn-1Y

 

[clementVII]

You should never have named your alias, “Ben SINNER.” Because of that, you were overlooked by the angel of mercy, and therefore are alone to fight off the demons and spare your destiny.

Paul refers to himself as the “chief of sinners.” In Romans 7, he concludes his long tract on sin having a hold on him with “I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I of myself serve [present tense, i.e. born again Paul, not pre-Damascus Saul] the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” Elsewhere he writes, “But if Christ is in you, although your bodies are dead because of sin, your spirits are alive because of righteousness.” (Romans 8)

“Simul justus et peccator.”

And we are all “Ben sinners,” because we are all sons of Adam, the first sinner (“ben” in Hebrew meaning “son”).

Cheers!

 

[clementVII]

These two things have caused me to be in constant confusion and anxiety because I’m not really sure what to believe. “Can things really be true and untrue at the same time?..That means that Christ could have been the Savior and not the Savior at the same time?”…etc.

Ben, it seems to me that when it comes to faith, as the French say, you’re seeking mid-day at midnite (barking up the wrong tree). When you fuel your car, you don’t use lighter fluid, but gasoline. When it comes to the car called faith, man’s various puny systems are to God’s Word/power what lighter fluid is to gasoline.

Paul was an erudite man, thoroughly steeped in the logical systems of the Pharisees, and also well-versed in Pagan philosophy. Yet consider what he says about faith and salvation matters:

Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through [manmade philosophical systems of] “wisdom”, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom [human philosophical systems], but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the “foolishness” of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

Philosophy can never constitute the bedrock of our faith. Rather, belief in Christ and the Gospel is imparted by God’s Spirit (cf. Peter’s affirmation of Christ being the Messiah, and Christ telling him, “Flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but the Father”). What does Jesus promise us? “Thy Word is truth…and you shall know the Truth, and it shall make you free.” Free not only from the bondage of our old fallen nature, but from the world’s transitory and constantly shifting philosophies (aka doctrines, though the secularists never call them that), from relativism and its spawn, nihilism.

As long as you look to manmade systems as your anchor, you will continually suffer the shipwrecking of your faith: “no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles.” Look at those cutting terms: “cunning,” “craftiness,” “deceitful wiles.” Fallen man is hugely capable of serpentine systems of thought, but they are nothing more than a case of “they became** futile** in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools…” (Romans 1) The fallen nature is adept at weaving together all manner of shiny looking lying systems…which are in fact rotten to the core, or at the very least, totally inadequate for the spiritual life God calls us to.

My speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power,*** that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.***

God’s Word is our reliable anchor. Everything else is shifting sand. Steep yourself in His Word.

 

[jonathan_hili]

Hi Ben,

Logic is a means by which we convert thoughts - and reasonable thoughts specifically - into meaningful symbolic language. Consequently, different logical systems could be developed and be consistent within themselves but inconsistent with others. This does not mean, however, that they are all reasonable. For instance:

“This sentence is false.” - When we consider the internal logic of the sentence’s meaning, it seems to be be fine, and so a contradiction results. However, when we consider the reasonableness of what is being said, we can see a problem: a sentence of itself is neither true nor false, rather the proposition expressed by the sentence is true or false. And so, if “This sentence is false” means “What this sentence expresses as true is not true”, we can see that it is a meaningless sentence because the sentence is not expressing anything as true or not true.

Likewise: “There are no absolutes”. The meaning expressed here is that no absolute statements are true in reality. However, this is clearly false since the statement expressed by the sentence is itself absolutist.

I guess my point is that while a logical language system may be consistent within itself it doesn’t follow that the meaning of its propositions are reasonable or true.

 

[Ben_Sinner]

One other thing I forgot to post on here is the concept of trivalent logic, or many-valued logic.

This form of logic doesn’t believe that something is only either true or false.

This system believes something can be either: true, false, or undetermined.

I’ve been trying to beat this form of logic with the law of non-contradiction but haven’t been successful yet.

I’m also unsure on how we can know something is true, false, or undetermined. Undetermined is a very vague concept.

 

[Rhubarb]

Perhaps it might help if you distinguish between two things - the world, and talking about the world. That’s how I understand logic to work. Logic is just a language. One that we invented, and whose rules we control. Some logics map onto the world pretty well. Others map oddly in more abstract ways. Logic deals in propositions - sentences. Not the real world. It just so happens that some of those sentences describe or map onto the real world very well.

Even with all our various logics, I think that there is still ‘the case’. I use that phrase because philosophers often use the preface iIt is the case that…". I believe that there is a set of all the facts. This set gives a complete description of reality. This set is ‘what is the case’. One fact in this set is ‘Rhubarb is in his easy chair typing on his laptop’, and, it is the case that I am, in fact, sitting in my easy chair typing on my laptop. The way we use logic doesn’t change the set of facts. It doesn’t change what is the case. It only changes how we can talk about the facts. If we’re using a weird logic and we derive that it’s indeterminate that the sky is blue, it could very well be that we’re just missing some (true) premise to make the final leap. It could very well happen that there is some great argument that every philosopher takes as true, but, eventually some theory comes around that demonstrates a premise was false. Suddenly, this truism that everyone believed is in question. Whatever this formerly-true conclusion was, in the set of all facts the matter is settled. Even if we’re not talking about it correctly or in a way that makes sense.

 

[rossum]

I’m also unsure on how we can know something is true, false, or undetermined. Undetermined is a very vague concept.

Science is not a logical system, though it does use logic. In particular, it uses the three-valued logic you refer to. The default answer to many scientific questions is ‘undetermined’, or ‘we don’t know’.

In order to move from undetermined to a specific answer, various hypotheses are proposed and are tested by experiment. Hypotheses that fail in experiment are rejected. Hypotheses that pass the experimental test are refined and retested. Eventually science accepts that it has got a good approximation of the truth, and will elevate the most successful hypothesis to the status of ‘theory’. A scientific theory is not an absolute pure logical truth. All theories are provisional and can be replaced by a better theory, after testing the new hypothesis of course.

The classic example is Newton’s theory of gravitation being replaced by Einstein’s theory of relativity. Newton’s theory was very good, but it did not match the observations in certain respects. Einstein proposed a new hypothesis, and this new hypothesis was tested, as with Eddington’s observations of the 1919 eclipse. Having passed this and other experimental tests, Newtonian gravity was replaced by Einsteinian gravity.

Scientific truth is not logical truth. Scientific truth is an asymptotic approach to the truth. It gets ever closer but can never be shown to have reached its destination. For example, we already know that there are situations where Einstein’s theory fails, and we are going to have to replace it with a theory of Quantum Gravity. Science approaches closer and closer to the truth, but can never know if it has reached its goal.

rossum

 

[SimmieKay]

One other thing I forgot to post on here is the concept of trivalent logic, or many-valued logic.

This form of logic doesn’t believe that something is only either true or false.

This system believes something can be either: true, false, or undetermined.

I’ve been trying to beat this form of logic with the law of non-contradiction but haven’t been successful yet.

I’m also unsure on how we can know something is true, false, or undetermined. Undetermined is a very vague concept.

I don’t think the idea that some things are neither true nor false should necessarily be shocking. Consider nonsense sentences, like those of Lewis Carroll:

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Is such intentional nonsense true or false? Maybe it is undetermined.

Just remember that laws of logic such as the “law of the excluded middle” are not dogmas of the faith, but philosophical opinions about which we have the freedom to (intelligently) differ. Some mathematicians and philosophers have denounced intuitionistic logic as a mathematical heresy, but (to my knowledge) the Church never has.

Simon

 

[Ben_Sinner]

I believe in paraconsistent logic, yes, but I don’t think it needs to be an attack on absolute truth or on the Catholic faith.

Classical logic says: “All contradictions are false”. Now, I don’t agree with that. But I will say: “The vast majority of contradictions are false; one should never believe something you know to be a contradiction to be true without a sufficiently good reason”. Now, possibly such sufficiently good reasons exist when we are discussing certain mathematical and linguistic paradoxes - such as the liar paradox or Russell’s paradox.

There is a cause for concern though on absolute truth and the Catholic faith though if we agree with this stance.

If it is logically possible for a contradiction to be true, than that means it would be logically possible for God to create a rock so hard he couldn’t lift…thus he would be omnipotent and not omnipotent at the same time…thus he would be a fraud.

 

[Wesrock]

Relativism is self-defeating. The relativistic argument boils down to their being no ultimate truth. Yet to even state that while being a relatavist puts you in a logical contradiction. It’s a belief that can’t be proven from any logic within relatavism. It’s just an a priori assumption shared by all relatavists that make such a belief possible. Anyway, that may not prove the Scholastics right, but relatavism really has no way to prove there are no truths. The best they can do is make metaphysical assumptions that their system can’t address and are interally inconsistent.

 

[ynotzap]

There are a few things that keep me from moving on and start to question absolute truth. I need some help in getting rid of these hang-ups and put these issues at rest

I would appreciate some really solid rebuttals of these claims that attack traditional logic.

For logic to be the tool it was meant to be, to acquire truth, can not be at its foundation a logic based on a system of relativity, for if it is, it can change depending on it’s relationship to other truths, it does not possess a solid, unchangeable foundation. For example: If an irresistible force meets an immovable object what will happen. Ans. nothing! You can not have an irresistible force and an immovable object at the same time. The force can not be irresistible, if the object is immovable, and the object can not be immovable if the force is irresistible at the same time One statement annihilates the other . There are guiding principles in logic that lead to the truth, they are self-evident, shine by their own light, and don’t have to be rationalized and they are God-given for they proceed from Him, The Eternal Truth. these truth are absolute anchors, not depending on relationships with other truths or systems.