Monday, 23 September 2013

Why Grue "cant touch this" in under 200 words.



If in object is green, then it could be grue. Is this a problem for a theory which predicts the continuation of patterns?..  

If,
grue is the property of changing in some way at some future time
Then,
we cannot reasonably conclude that any object is grue from some observation of the present

             If,
             we cannot reasonably conclude that any object is grue
             Then,
             we cannot reasonably believe that there is a pattern of some object being grue.

             If,
             we cannot reasonably believe that there is a pattern some object being grue
             Then,
 a theory which predicts the continuation of patterns would not predict the continuation of some      object’s grueness .

However this line of reasoning does not apply to “green” because we can reasonable conclude that an object is green. Therefore we can reasonably believe that there is a pattern of some object being green. Therefore a theory which predicts the continuation of patterns would predict the continuation of some objects greenness.

It seems that if one wants to disagree they either have to hold that we can reasonably believe that some object is grue or hold that we cannot reasonable believe that certain objects are green. 

 S.
               

Thursday, 6 June 2013

1.
Within my consciousness there is the image of a rose
Within my physical brain there is no image of a rose
Therefore my consciousness and my brain are distinct

2.All physical things are objectively observable
My consciousness is not objectively observable
Therefore my consciousness is not a physical thing

3.
All physical things have causal powers
My consciousness, distinct from my brain, does not have causal powers
Therefore my consciousness is not a physical thing




Monday, 14 January 2013

an argument..



If
X, Y and Z are possible future occurrences that                   contradict each other. (future swans are white(X), future swans are green(Y), future swans are yellow(Z))
and
one of them logically must occur (There is no way that future swans could be any other colour)
and
X, Y and Z all have an equal chance of occurring 
then
it is reasonable to believe that it is likely that X or Y will occur. 

Because X Y and Z all have equal probability of occurring it is reasonable to expect that one of any two of the possibilities will occur. (one of two has a 66% chance of occurring)

 Me and J were looking at this the other night and we thought there was a problem with it somewhere but now i dont see it so point it out if its still there.
Moving on to J's objection, I think it was something along the lines of "although this argument is sound.." or "even if this argument is sound... it would justify thinking that the swans will be grue". This is true! by the reasoning above it is reasonable to believe that at least the next one swan you see will be grue.
 
 the objection can work for all kinds of things. any question phrased in the following way will lead to similar bizarre conclusions..

"on how many future occasions, in a row, starting with the next one i see, will...swans be grue? swans have big teeth? swans have two heads?
in all these scenarios the reasonable answer is "at least once" (by reasoning similar to the argument above)

 A response to this objection is that it would be silly to expect anything but a contradiction when asking such questions.
for example there is no point in asking "on how many future occasions, in a row, starting with the next one i see, will...future swans be grue?" because you know you can ask the opposite question "...future swans be a colour other than grue?" and you will get contradicting answers.
However not all questions suffer this fate. take the question "on how many future occasions, in a row, will past pattern X continue?" This question is immune to the criticisms of the previous question because its opposite question doesn't lead to contradicting answers; "on how many future occasions, in a row, will past pattern X cease?" This question only has 2 possible answers: either "Once" or "Never". 
The other questions we have looked at had an infinite amont of answers. this question however only has two so the reasoning we were using before doesn't work.
 The reasoning relies on three (X,Y and Z)or more possible answers  (X, Y, Z and so on for infinity ).
The criticism works against almost any question accept the "past pattern" question. that is why we can only use the kind of reasoning at the top of the page on the the "past pattern" question.

  

  
  

 

Sunday, 21 October 2012

J: 'Was Polus Refuted?' Essay

Was Polus refuted?
In the Gorgias there are several issues of contention that cannot be discussed in full, yet nonetheless can affect greatly whatever conclusions are made in this essay. For instance distinguishing what Socrates thought from what the Platonic Socrates thought is difficult, but this seems more fitting for the study of classics. There is dispute regarding translations too, definitions make or break arguments and it is not always crystal clear the English term is what was meant. In this essay I have used the World Classics translation as a base1, but much of the quotation comes from an article by Gregory Vlastos. The Platonic Socrates will be simply called Socrates, for the sake of brevity.
In Plato's Gorgias,the discussion between Socrates and Gorgias comes to an end when Polus interrupts and accuses Socrates of putting Gorgias in a position where he felt too ashamed to say what he really thought. They continue along the issue of rhetoric, which Polus initially advocates the teaching and use of, while Socrates disagrees. The discussion moves from rhetoric to power, where Polus sets out his position that wronging another is better than suffering wrong, while admitting that wronging another is 'uglier' than suffering wrong. The introduction of the term 'ugly' is exploited by Socrates, and in the text, it is clear he thinks he has refuted Polus and asserted his own position. Gregory Vlastos was the first to dispute this in his article of the same name as the essay, writing “[Plato] thought Socrates' dialectic had refuted Polus' doctrine, when all it had done was to refute the man.”2 This is the line I will take in answering “was Polus refuted?”. Polus was certainly inconsistent in what he said, or was lead to say, and so 'lost' the argument, but I do not think his central premises about suffering and committing wrong were shown to be contradictory in themselves, as Socrates claims. I agree with Vlastos' answer that Polus the man was refuted, but the doctrine of Polus was not.
The doctrine of Polus can be considered a pair of premises, which Socrates thinks are contradictory:

Doing wrong to another is better than having wrong done to you.
And
 Doing wrong to another is more ugly than having wrong done to you.

This doctrine has a intuitive feeling to it. Premise 1 is particularly survival-based, it is not strictly advocating doing wrong, just that it is preferable given the alternative of suffering it. Premise 2 contains the ambiguity Socrates exploits, whether intentionally or not is hard to say, though if he is to be believed, he thinks he is proving Polus wrong with the truth, and brags“the truth can never be proved wrong”3. The ambiguity is to whom doing wrong is more ugly to. Does Polus mean:

'Doing wrong to another is more ugly to the wrongdoer'
or
'Doing wrong to another is more ugly to the audience'

Where 'audience' could mean the sufferer, the public in general, or someone present at the time of wrong-doing. The exact meaning of audience is not all that important, almost any interpretation of 'audience' as long as it is understood as not the wrongdoer, would get Polus out of the contradiction Socrates claims is contained in premise 1 and 2. 
After Polus' premises are made, Socrates starts by asking him of beauty; “In the case of all beautiful things-such as bodies, colours, figures, sounds, practices - don't you call them "beautiful" with an eye to something?”4 before stating examples of the listed beautiful things. It is very clear from this statement however that things are considered beautiful by the beholder or viewer with an eye to something, that is, a standard of the beholders creation, that is used to decide if it is beautiful or not. The objective conclusion Socrates reaches cannot at all be considered to be present in this first statement.
In the first example the standards of beauty one compares bodies to is “...either on account of their usefulness for some particular purpose or because of a certain pleasure, if they delight their beholder in beholding them”.4
The qualification “...if they delight their beholder in beholding them” is meant to carry over to examples 2 and 3, in which Socrates shortens the sentences, which begin with “So too in the case of...”4 and “And likewise in the case of...”4 This manner of considering examples is clearly intended to keep the same qualification even though it is omitted after example 1.

Example 4: “And further in the case of laws and practices: does not their beauty fall within the scope of usefulness or pleasure or of both?”4

the use of “and further in the case of...” makes it seem that this example has the same form as the previous ones which all had the qualification of 1: “...if they delight their beholder in beholding them” but Socrates is not asking this at all, it is now a question of usefulness or pleasure of both, the importance of how things seem to the beholder is gone, and peerless Polus does not notice it.
Socrates uses this to conclude “So when one of two beautiful things is the more beautiful, it must be so by surpassing the other in one or the other or both of these two respects: pleasurableness, usefulness, or both...”4 if the examples were supposed to be consistent with the statement and first premises qualification of beauty, this conclusion does not follow, and no doubt Polus would be confused as to how he had hidden this peculiar opinion in his very bare premises.
All the quotations thus far have come from Vlastos' 'Was Polus Refuted?', but here it is not helpful to use the translation he used for Socrates' definition of ugly “...And when one of two ugly things is the uglier, it must be so by surpassing the other in painfulness or in evil”4 where Vlastos says in substituting 'evil' for 'harmfulness' and 'good' for 'usefulness' there is no skulduggery. If we keep in mind that the respects that they have agreed on are usefulness for a purpose, and pleasure, we can re-word it in a way that doesn't introduce new synonyms 'And when one of two ugly things is the uglier, it must be so by surpassing the other in unpleasantness or in harmfulness' where harmfulness is meant as harmful to a purpose, in this way it is the opposite of usefulness to a purpose. This is almost exactly the form that is found in the Oxford World Classics translation:

And when one of a pair of contemptible things is more contemptible than the other, this is because it exceeds the other either in unpleasantness or in harmfulness.”5

More simply one could say:
'when one of two ugly things is the uglier, it must be so by being more harmful or more unpleasant.'
Polus accepts this formulation, and now the stage is set for Socrates' decisive argument, or so he thinks.
The dialogue Socrates uses, while rather straight forward, masks the ambiguity we identified at the start of this essay in Polus' second premise regarding to whom doing wrong is ugly to. Therefore I will present the few pages of dialogue in premises and conclusion form that was given in the relevant lectures, using the above formulation of 'more ugly'.
  1. Doing wrong to another is more ugly than having wrong done to you.
  2. This must be because doing wrong to another is either:
    a) more harmful than having wrong done to you.
    Or
    b) more unpleasant than having wrong done to you.
  3. One could find doing wrong pleasant.
  4. Therefore, 2-b is not the case.
  5. Therefore, 2-a is the case: Doing wrong to another is more harmful than having wrong done to you.
Socrates concludes Polus' premise 'Doing wrong to another is better than having wrong done to you' is inconsistent with 5. Since 5 follows from 1 (Polus' other premise) Polus' doctrine is refuted. This is not necessarily the case. Remember the ambiguity of 'more ugly to whom', and we can reformulate Socrates' argument as
  1. Doing wrong to another is more ugly than having wrong done to you.
  2. This must be because doing wrong to another is either:
    a) more harmful to the wrong-doer than having wrong done to you.
    b) more harmful for the audience than having wrong done to you.
    c) more unpleasant to the wrong-doer than having wrong done to you.
    d) more unpleasant for the audience than having wrong done to you.
  3. The wrong-doer could find doing wrong pleasant.
  4. Therefore, 2-c is not the case.
  5. Therefore, 2-a is the case: Doing wrong to another is more harmful to the wrong-doer than having wrong done to you.
In this argument 5 clearly does not follow from 1-4. 2-b is trivial, as the audience would be not be harmed by you doing wrong or suffering wrong. But there is nothing to stop 2-d being the case, in fact it seems this is the sense in which Polus meant his premise to be read. It seems to be the case that the audience would find your actions more unpleasant when you do wrong. The audience would have to be pretty unsympathetic to find you suffering wrong more unpleasant than you doing wrong.
To recognise that this argument does not lead to the internal contradiction of Polus' premises 'Doing wrong to another is better than having wrong done to you' and 'Doing wrong to another is more ugly than having wrong done to you' Is to recognise Socrates did not refute Polus entirely. Polus was certainly defeated by first failing to see the essential difference between pleasure and pleasure to the beholder, and secondly letting Socrates change the meaning of his second premise through the ambiguity of 'ugly to whom'. Of course it could be said that Polus really meant 'ugly to the wrong-doer' but this makes the two premises so obviously contradictory it seems no-one would bother to think of them as a doctrine. Terrence Irwin suggests had Polus not denied that 'doing wrong is worse for the wrong-doer than suffering wrong' in the objective sense of 'wrong', whether or not he realised it, denied himself an avenue of escape by suggesting 'suffering wrong is worse for me than some shameful actions'.6
Additionally, Polus could have meant ugly in that sense but retain the qualification of 'to the beholder' and so avoid Socrates' strict objective dichotomy of harmful and unpleasant. For these reasons, it was not the doctrine of Polus that was shown to be inconsistent by Socrates, and hence refuted, but merely the man.

Bibliography
1Robin Waterfield, The World Classics Plato Gorgias, Oxford University Press 1994
2 Gregory Vlastos, “Was Polus Refuted?” The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 88, No. 4, (Oct., 1967), pp. 454-460. The Johns Hopkins University Press, page 459
3 Robin Waterfield, The World Classics Plato Gorgias, section 473b page 47
4 Gregory Vlastos, “Was Polus Refuted?” The American Journal of Philology, page 455
4 Gregory Vlastos, “Was Polus Refuted?” The American Journal of Philology, page 455
5 Robin Waterfield, The World Classics Plato Gorgias, section 475b page 50
6Terence Irwin, Plato's Ethics, Oxford University Press Inc. (1995) page 100