/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6641521]

ITT we make fun of Hume for removing final causes / reflexology from reality and concluding that you cannot derive an 'ought' from an 'is'.

Me: David, what's wrong with your car, it only has three wheels.

David: I don't see the problem.

Me: What? A car ought to have four wheels (at least this car ought, as it is clearly designed as a standard four-wheeled vehicle) as the final end of a car is transportation, which end is frustrated if one of its wheels are missing.

David: haha, no my friend, surely you are not saying that one can derive an 'ought' from an 'is'.

(I slap David on the head)

David: you ought not to have done that!

Me: only because the final end of humanity is happiness and the pain you are experiencing is frustrating the attainment of that end, David.

[Anonymous No.6641525]

>reflexology
damn I hate auto-correct
teleology*

[Anonymous No.6641619]

>>6641521
>Ought I agree with David Hume?
>Yes you ough....should!

Checkmate Scotman.

[Anonymous No.6641672]

Sounds like Hume rekt you and yr just mad, m8. Maybe check some Aristotle or Kant and then you can give a proper response

[Anonymous No.6641749]

durr i also think that what we should do must always follow from what we can say because i'm a retard

[Anonymous No.6641758]

>>6641672
You must be really pathetic to get rekt in hypothetical situations you daydream about. Maybe you should go see a therapist OP?

[Anonymous No.6641762]

>>6641521
That's deriving oughts from other oughts. Jesus, man, at least put some effort into your strawman; I've seen better ones from young earth creationists debunking evolution.

[Anonymous No.6641794]

>>6641521

>we make fun of Hume for removing final causes


You can't "remove" something that is fictional.

[Anonymous No.6641952]

>>6641794
>causes
>You can't "remove" something that is fictional.

Yeah, but final causes are not fictional.

[Anonymous No.6641957]

>>6641952
Yes they are :^)

[Anonymous No.6641967]

>>6641957
>>6641952
This is what every /lit/ debate boils down to

[Anonymous No.6642018]

OP, if something only has meaning / purpose insofar as we specify some given end, then it is just an 'Is' statement in the form of, "Doing X leads to Y". There's nothing normative or interesting in that.

[Anonymous No.6642021]

>>6641952

>Yeah, but final causes are not fictional.

Yes they are.
Causes are objective, final causes aren't, therefore they aren't causes.

[Anonymous No.6642026]

>>6641957
>someone drew this picture

[Anonymous No.6642032]

>>6642021
>>Causes are objective,
to whom ?

[Anonymous No.6642047]

>>6642032

>to whom ?

Objective things aren't objective to someone. They're objective, you're thinking about subjective things.

You know, those things that are the literal opposite of what I said?

[Anonymous No.6642063]

>>6642018
>OP, if something only has meaning / purpose insofar as we specify some given end, then it is just an 'Is' statement in the form of, "Doing X leads to Y". There's nothing normative or interesting in that.

Man does not "give" meaning to things. Things have meaning by their very nature. That a car ought to have four wheels is not a meaning that we have given to the car, it comes from the very nature, the intelligible form, of the car that it should facilitate transportation, and therefore have four wheels (or some other mechanism that facilitates its movement).

When I say that a man ought to be able to see, that is not something that I've given to the man, but a part of the nature of man which involves the power of sight.
When I look at a plant with shrivelled leaves and dying roots, and say that it ought to have healthy leaves and flourishing roots, that is not my giving meaning to the plant, it is part of the very nature of the plant to have healthy leaves and flourishing roots.

[Anonymous No.6642066]

>>6642026
You can't prove that this picture didn't just evolve from a preceding set of pictures due to environmental pressures, tbh.

[Anonymous No.6642067]

>>6642063

>Things have meaning by their very nature.


You literally believe in spooks

[Anonymous No.6642072]

>>6642067
Intelligible forms are not spooks they are the very object of our intellect. Intelligible forms are to our intellect what light is to our eyes and sound is to our ears. What you are essentially saying is that we should blind the eye of our intellect and become as the beasts.

[Anonymous No.6642073]

>>6642021
why are causes objetcive

[Anonymous No.6642083]

>>6642021
Final causes are objective, though. Can't have causes of any kind without final causality, really.

[Anonymous No.6642087]

>>6642063
If the car has four wheels, it will be able to drive. If you say that the car 'ought' to have four wheels, you're assuming that it 'ought' to drive. There always needs to be some 'in order to..' otherwise the 'ought' is just an empty demand.

[Anonymous No.6642097]

Final causes exist, but only inside your brain.

[Anonymous No.6642108]

>>6642032
more like TO HUME

[Anonymous No.6642115]

>>6642087
> If you say that the car 'ought' to have four wheels, you're assuming that it 'ought' to drive.

That a car ought to drive is not an assumption. To say that a car ought to drive is practically a tautology, it's pretty much to say, "the car ought to be a car".

>There always needs to be some 'in order to..'

The object of "in order to" is the final cause, the ultimate cause of its existence.

>>6642097
This is just one step from saying that all causes are in your brain.

[Anonymous No.6642131]

>>6642115
>"the car ought to be a car".

If it's part of a car's nature to have four wheels, then you'd be saying, "This three wheeled object ought to become a car", or "This car ought to *remain* a car."

[Anonymous No.6642136]

>>6642115
>This is just one step from saying that all causes are in your brain.
That's a slippery slope argument.

[Anonymous No.6642386]

>>6641525
Autocorrect just gave you a nietzschean bitchslap. The final cause is already a manifestation of something else, like a sympthom. There is no ought, there is only 'is'. You cannot derive is from ought because there are only contingent 'is'-es manifesting themselves as oughts.

[Anonymous No.6642390]

>>6641521
hume was so fucking fat

[Anonymous No.6642402]

OP getting absolutely dismantled ITT

[Anonymous No.6642442]

>>6642063

>Classic case of "muh forms"

How do you feel in light of evolution?

[Anonymous No.6642564]

I thought this would be about Tobias Hume, now I'm sad.

[Anonymous No.6642575]

>muh teleology

[Anonymous No.6642650]

>>6642442
Evolution requires change, which requires Forms, so I guess he'd be feeling pretty good.

[Anonymous No.6642986]

>>6642564

I know right? I just got here. Disappointed as fuck.

[Anonymous No.6643160]

>>6642026
This picture drew itself.

[Anonymous No.6643172]

>>6642063
>Things have meaning by their very nature

[Anonymous No.6644266]

>>6642650
>change requires Forms

Pure ideology. What makes you think a matter-form dualism that implies passive unchangeable matter still stands?

[Anonymous No.6644283]

>Final causes

[Anonymous No.6644298]

>>6641521
>Me: What? A car ought to have four wheels (at least this car ought, as it is clearly designed as a standard four-wheeled vehicle) as the final end of a car is transportation, which end is frustrated if one of its wheels are missing.

I see no reason why this particular car has the final end of transportation.

[Anonymous No.6644320]

>>6644266
>pure ideology

Matter is of its very nature mutable, so I'm not sure what you mean by "unchangeable matter."

I think hylomorphism is true because I think that there are multiple things in the world, which entails that there is some shared principle in virtue of which they are all things (the universal, or the form, which makes each what it is), and some individuating principle in virtue of which each is itself and not another. Change is also impossible to understand apart from hylomorphism, since it presupposes difference between what-it-is-to-be the beginning and the end of a change (hence distinct forms), and also a substrate of potentiality-for-change which receives new form (matter).

[Anonymous No.6644884]

>>6644320
I'm no expert, but I think there is a different way to interpret things.

Matter is not mutable if there are no Forms involved in the model you described, unless I'm mistaken.

>Universal (or Form) + Individuating principle = Individual

If we go the opposite route and assume that the individuals' interactions create universals, we would assume that Matter is the one generating Form. The distinction between Forms that can change into one another (or just one way obviously) gets blurred once you attempt to introduce accidents to distinguish one version of a form (due to the individuation principle) from another version and yet again those from the distinct different Form that it changes into.

Sorry if I'm not being clear about it, basically I don't understand how hylomorphism accounts for biological evolution without vague concepts. There are leaps from one constituted (and thriving) species to another, but the individual conditions that allow such leaps may not be equally present in all the individuals of a species. So one weird solution for instance is to consider a new species as only existing when only one individual (mutant) exists of it. But that's already very close to pluralism and away from hylomorphism.

[Anonymous No.6647127]

>>6644884

>Matter is not mutable if there are no Forms involved in the model you described, unless I'm mistaken.

There's no such thing as matter considered apart from Form, since to have a nature at all is to have a Form of some kind. Matter is thus only what it is in relation to Form. Whatever concept you have of matter apart from Form probably isn't intelligible when you look closely at it (as Berkeley found).

Without matter and Form you get Parmenidean Being, indivisible and unchangeable, which is basically to toss out the possibility of empiricism and knowledge altogether and to subscribe to a weird kind of pantheism.

>If we go the opposite route and assume that the individuals' interactions create universals, we would assume that Matter is the one generating Form

To have such things as "individuals" in the first place, as I said earlier, presupposes Form. The "bare individual," that is, the individual considered apart from all nature, is indistinguishable from nothing, hence couldn't act. So I don't think the opposite route is viable.

>I don't understand how hylomorphism accounts for biological evolution without vague concepts

There's nothing presenting Forms from having empirically fuzzy boundaries. Form is the actuality to the potency of matter, so can be realised to varying degrees in matter, and a low degree of one Form may appear to be a high degree of another. I'm not sure what about this is inconsistent with biological evolution.

[Anonymous No.6647133]

>>6644283
Jesus, good thing my speakers weren't plugged in.

[Anonymous No.6647190]

>>6642021
You can't observe causes, what you observe is spacio-temporal proximity and regularity between events. You infer the cause.

[Anonymous No.6647201]

>>6642564
He removed final causes too? What a coincidence!

[Anonymous No.6647206]

>>6647133
w-what?

[Anonymous No.6647252]

>>6647190
Nah, man, those are abstractions from the actual event which is the object of experience (I've never observed "spatio-temporal proximity" itself, but I have observed billiard balls knocking into one another). You observe the cause itself, then abstract out things like spatio-temporal proximity and regularity as accidental features of such, and it's reifying those abstractions which is Hume's big trick.

[Anonymous No.6647258]

>>6647252
>You observe the cause itself
Different anon here, what does causation look like?

[Anonymous No.6647280]

>>6647258

Doesn't look like anything in particular- considered solely in itself it's just an abstraction. What I said was that you observe the cause itself- i.e., the thing doing the causing. We derive causation as an abstraction from observing the cause, but causation as it exists in concrete causes isn't an abstraction.

You can usually tell the causal relationships at work when you understand a phenomenon and its components- the whole event and its parts, upon which it is dependent. The trick is to isolate the phenomenon from others and from accidents of time and place enough to get a clear look at it, which is what we do when we set up experiments with repeated trials and controls.

[Anonymous No.6647290]

>>6647280
>What I said was that you observe the cause itself- i.e., the thing doing the causing.
Hume doesn't even contest that, though. Your whole critique is uninformed and pointless.

[Anonymous No.6647305]

>>6647290

Hume mistakes causation for mere temporal and local proximity. Pretty sure that means that Hume thinks you don't observe causes, in the sense of ontological dependence, when I was contending that you in fact do observe things ontologically depending on each other.

[Anonymous No.6647310]

>>6647305
>Hume mistakes causation for mere temporal and local proximity
No he says we interpret proximity as causation, when we in fact have no certainty of this.
>you in fact do observe things ontologically depending on each other
And now tell me, how exactly do you tell such dependency from a coincidence, other than by induction, i.e. without certainty?

[Anonymous No.6647326]

>>6647310
>No he says we interpret proximity as causation, when we in fact have no certainty of this.

Pretty sure he said that what we think is an idea of causation is actually dressed-up proximity. He doesn't think we actually have an idea of ontological dependence at all (though this renders his avowed support of an inaccessible Nature somewhat puzzling).

>And now tell me, how exactly do you tell such dependency from a coincidence, other than by induction, i.e. without certainty?

There's nothing wrong with induction- repeated experience is how we identify the phenomenon as isolated from accidents, and hence perceive its parts, i.e., causes. Insofar as a phenomenon can be identified at all, then, at least some of its causes can be known. Naturally, this doesn't give us certainty, but certainty isn't necessary to know something- what's necessary is actual union with the reality of the thing, via experience.

[Anonymous No.6647346]

>>6647326
>There's nothing wrong with induction
Said the proverbial turkey on the morning of thanksgiving, assured by inductive reasoning that no one would do him harm.
Inductive reasoning is absolutely necessary, but it by always involves assumptions of things we do not actually know. Hume's point is that this is happening in each and every indentification of cause and effect. You haven't provided a single argument against this.
>but certainty isn't necessary to know something
You fucking wot m8?
>what's necessary is actual union with the reality of the thing
Which you can't be certain of. So, you assume a cause, and you assume this assumption to be in union with reality. Two assumptions do not make a knowledge.

[Anonymous No.6647370]

>>6647346
>There's nothing wrong with induction
he is right that There's nothing wrong with induction, as long as we take the principle of induction for what it is (and every science relying on it to provide a few causal descriptions of the phenomenon). Many people forget this and are shocked when they find a new experience were the old models no longer statisfy their expectations, whereas people should be shocked by th euse of the induction.

[Anonymous No.6647375]

>>6647346
>Said the proverbial turkey on the morning of thanksgiving, assured by inductive reasoning that no one would do him harm

Who said induction gives infallible predictive knowledge? That's the Humean conflation of causation with proximity talking, which makes induction about predicting future temporal proximity. Induction lets us know some of the causes of things, but obviously since no one knows all the causes of all things, and this can be useful if one knows the most common configurations of cause and effect for the purposes of one's prediction. Obviously, one cannot make predictions about the future with 100% confidence, but given that one is correct about a given state of affairs, and one's belief has come about by a mechanism that unifies an observer with reality in that particular case, it's hard to see how the belief is not both warranted and true, hence knowledge.

>Which you can't be certain of.

Don't see why you're so hung up on certainty. Certainty is a subjective attitude we take toward our beliefs, some of which may be knowledge. What knowledge is, is a matter of whether one is objectively unified to reality in one's belief. One can have knowledge one is not terribly certain of, and one can be terribly certain of a belief that happens not to be knowledge. One can bring one's subjective certainty in line with the degree of one's knowledge by collecting observations and refining methods, of course, which is probably ideal.

Just because we can't be completely certain of our beliefs, doesn't mean that we can't have knowledge. It simply doesn't follow from the fact that we don't have subjective certainty that we can't have objective union with reality. It's simply a claim to which one is not and cannot be entitled that all beliefs without foundation in other beliefs are not knowledge.

[Anonymous No.6647378]

>>6647375

Ack, messed up first paragraph. Should read,

"Who said induction gives infallible predictive knowledge? That's the Humean conflation of causation with proximity talking, which makes induction about predicting future temporal proximity. Induction lets us know some of the causes of things, and this can be useful if one knows the most common configurations of cause and effect for the purposes of one's prediction. Obviously, since no one knows all the causes of things, one cannot make predictions about the future with 100% confidence, but given that one is correct about a given state of affairs, and one's belief has come about by a mechanism that unifies an observer with reality in that particular case, it's hard to see how the belief is not both warranted and true, hence knowledge.

[Anonymous No.6647379]

>>6647375
Kek, this is basically sophistry.

[Anonymous No.6647381]

>>6647375
>What knowledge is, is a matter of whether one is objectively unified to reality in one's belief
And how are you ever justified in believing this to be the case?

[Anonymous No.6647385]

Requesting the Hume copypasta

[Anonymous No.6647389]

>>6647378

More clarification. By "Who said induction gives infallible predictive knowledge?" I don't mean that Hume thinks induction gives certain knowledge. What I meant to say was, "Who says that induction, in order to give us knowledge, must give us infallible predictive knowledge?"

I should proofread.

[Anonymous No.6647396]

>>6647379

Nah, Humeanism in general is the sophistry. Aristotelianism is the light.

[Anonymous No.6647410]

>>6647396
You would be laughed out of any philosophy department with that phrase.

[Anonymous No.6647413]

>>6644283
Been a while since I was tricked into one of these, thanks.

[Anonymous No.6647415]

>>6647206
>he doesn't get audio on gifs

[Anonymous No.6647424]

>>6647410
Eh, not from my experience.

[Anonymous No.6647449]

Sounds like Hume rekt you and your just mad, mate.

At first you felt challenged, then you started feeling your delusional mania, I bet it took awhile before the dopamine rush started making you "creative", and then ASFSGSFADSAG you shitposted, otherwise your reply to Hume would be serious.

Am I right?
*tips rice samurai fedora*