Comments on: 2008 TOC Video: Los Altos DM vs. Kinkaid BT

By: Faheem

Faheem — Mon, 26 May 2008 01:23:21 +0000

when will the rest of the rounds be postd?

By: Christian

Christian — Mon, 19 May 2008 08:07:41 +0000

It’s also worth pointing out that the fact that this argument has been run on like the last seven topics, not one of which is in fact phrased as a negative existential, serves as a pretty good indication of just how many claims can be plausibly rewritten as negative existentials (in many cases to the point of provable logical equivalence), which it turn demonstrates just how weirdly extreme the skeptical position being taken up really is. Perhaps more to the point, you can almost always rewrite both the resolution and its negation as negative existential, the upshot of which I suppose is that the judge should just be too flummoxed to make any decision at all (in the case of this resolution, as against your re-writing of the res, one might offer “There are no nuclear weapons such that it is just for the United States to use military force to prevent the acquisition of them by nations that pose a military threat” or “There are no nations that both pose a military threat and are such that it is just for the United States to use military force to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons” or “There is no English preposition spelled ‘f-o-r’ such that its substitution for ‘x’ in the sentence “It is just x the United States to use military force to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by nations that pose a military threat” yields a truth of English.”)

By: Christian

Christian — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:57:18 +0000

Eric–
Any ordinary negation of a subject-predicate sentence can be turned into a negative existential. -P(t) iff -Ex(Px & x=t), so Kamil’s claim that he’s not in New York is equivalent to “There does not exist anyone in New York identical with Kamil Marchant”. This is maybe sort of trivial, but the point is that there are all sorts of empirical negative existential claims that, if not metaphysically certain, are at least pretty darn well evidenced. “All men are mortal,” i.e. “There are no immortal men,” strikes me as a pretty safe bet, for instance. The claims don’t have to be spatiotemporally bounded, either, though claims of that sort, like Kamil’s, provide pretty obvious counter-examples to your claim as well. I’m perfectly happy to claim that there are no men anywhere, past or present (or probably even future), who are immortal (or five hundred feet tall or faster than speeding bullets or whatever). Of course there’s still some degree of uncertainty to most of these claims (though not, probably, to claims like “There are no men who are also lobsters/galaxies/natural numbers”), but “You can’t assert anything in debate rounds except logic certainties” strikes me as a pretty hard position to maintain.

As regards ethics, you’re probably right that the evidence we have for believing negative existential claims about ethical constraints, obligations, etc is much weaker than the evidence we have for believing similar empirical claims. But the same could be said about any sort of claim in ethics, whether atomic, quantified, negated or whatever. Our understanding of ethics still lags a long way behind our understanding of the empirical world, but there are still some ethical claims of various logical forms that I think we should be happy to at least tentatively endorse. “There is no moral obligation binding people to murder babies” seems to be at least decently well-evidenced within any meta-ethical framework (either there are no moral obligations period, or we can discern them via inspecting our moral intuitions which say we probably shouldn’t murder babies, or we can discern them by examining the precepts of pure, Kantian reason which also say don’t murder babies, or we can take ethical terms to denote mental states like pleasure and pain which tend to be negatively impacted by baby murder, or…). Again, not absolute certainty, but pretty good epistemic grounds for belief.

My beef with this whole brand of argumentation and its popularity in the last couple years is that it ultimately does boil down to this sort of ridiculous, exaggerated skepticism that could equally well be taken as casting doubt on propositions of any other syntactic form (the basic skeptical claim is, “you can’t be omniscient so you can’t verify claims of this sort,” but our lack of omniscience unfortunately gets in the way of attempts to verify claims of all sorts of sorts). Moreover, the people who defend this argument to the hilt tend to be the same people who go crazy over much more reasonable, substantive skeptical claims, claims that say something more than “You can’t be absolutely, positively, knock-down certain of X, so you can’t assert it.” I think the best response is that, by the same logic, you lack justification for believing that there’s no big, angry, heavily tattooed guy with a tire iron standing outside the room waiting to beat you bloody if you vote for this argument, so you better just be on the safe side and vote for me instead.

By: Madeline

Madeline — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:42:08 +0000

I think Wes and Ben taped that one though. Bietz might have taped another one

By: Madeline

Madeline — Wed, 14 May 2008 23:39:22 +0000

Wade–I know Rebar and Joan’s was

By: wade

wade — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:13:15 +0000

which octas round was filmed?

By: epalm

epalm — Tue, 13 May 2008 23:25:48 +0000

Kamil,
A negative existential isn’t the same as a claim that uses negation. An existential claim says “There is some x”. A negative existential says “It is not the case that (there is some x)”. Contrast that with your non-existential “KM is in NY”. Obviously, you can know “KM is not in NY” if, for instance, one sees you in Illinois. This isn’t an existential though - it doesn’t assert that you exist or don’t exist. It presupposes you exist, then says something about you.

On ethics and the a priori - if you are a naturalist about ethics (e.g. if you think that “good” means “pleasurable” and “right” means “maximizes pleasure” or alternatively, if you think “X is good” represents the same fact as “X is pleasurable” even if “good” doesn’t literally mean “pleasurable”), then you don’t need to appeal to the a priori. Other views might have to.

By: Rebar Niemi

Rebar Niemi — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:01:13 +0000

i remember tim hogan’s rfd was essentially that he read the spike from the AC (definition of ‘is’) and the text said that moerner could only exclude specific solvency scenarios/turns, and he only considered the overstretch one a specific scenario, so he voted on the turns off schell. at least, that’s what i understood from it. maybe i’m actually deaf.

By: Jose Medina

Jose Medina — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:44:21 +0000

Haha, she’s pretty clever.

I mean, granted… but it was nice to see a round that wasn’t so tense.

By: Kamil Merchant

Kamil Merchant — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:11:35 +0000

It’s not exactly true for empirical claims (I mean, if you don’t adopt a Kantian then you can’t make negative existential claims) because you can say that I am not in New York rt now. of course, maybe that is not how it really is, but under more Kantian notions, I can say that I am not somewhere. Now, you cannot say that something does not exist, sure, but you can say that something is not the case. In this instance, I would say that a claim to morals isn’t positing a category of existence within the arg (it doesn’t apply to notions of space/time), but rather is applied A Priori.

While the knowledge might not be a priori it is applied in an a priori manner (there is no temporal nature to the res, so the position is categorical). in that way we can say that a moral is not the case or something is not permissible because it is an a priori judgment.

I mean, ethics as a discipline does not effectively use A Priori knowledge, but it can and ought to use it if it is to be an effective system of ethics.

I dunno, maybe I’m completely wrong here and have misunderstood the argument. You wouldn’t mind emailing/FBing me if I am wrong would you?