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hen comments on Morality should be Moral - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (63)
Either they're true, or they're not tautologies. Tautologies are always true. In this case, the first two seem to me at least to be true, and I don't understand the third.
Think of it this way:
"If a system is moral, then it is moral"
For example:
"If murder is moral, then murder is moral."
I guess I don't understand what you're getting at.
That's what they drill into us, but I really don't like that definition.
I prefer to say that statements which accurately describe this universe are "true". Tautologies are just tautological.
That's not a bad version. What I got from some of the sequences was that tautologies are true in all possible universes, they are true by definition, and that makes them useless.
Yeah...it's really just a semantic thing.
I like my technical jargon to match up with everyday use. In everyday life, when we say "that's true", we mean that that's real, not just that it's logically consistent and self justifying.
When your jargon doesn't match the everyday use, people get confused...like above, hen reached the conclusion that all morality is "true" because it is a tautology, with the implication being that all moral statements are right - that's an example of the sort of confusion that can occur.
You might want to add “but inaccurately describe at least one different universe”, otherwise tautologies are also true.
Hmm...maybe I shouldn't redefine truth after all, because you just used my new definition of truth in conjunction with the with the old definition of "accurate". Which is my fault, for using "accurate" in the definition...I've gotten too accustomed to using the common laymen's definition for "true" and "accurate" in my mind after internally redefining what they mean to fit the lay notion.
I guess we need a one syllable word for "statement which increases one's knowledge about the universe within which one exists". Thus "statements which are [insert word here] restrict the set of universes one is in" would be a tautology.
I just instinctively put "true" into "[insert word here]"...I really wish we had just originally started out using "true" to mean this...Accurate even means the act of precisely interacting with a point in space. I don't understand why we chose to define "tautologies" as true and accurate, when they pinpoint nothing whatsoever...
OTOH, we're not logically omniscient, so certain statements are useful to hear even if they are correct in all universes (e.g. “3107418240490043721350750035888567930037346022842727545720161948823206440518081504556346829671723286782437916272838033415471073108501919548529007337724822783525742386454014691736602477652346609 equals 1634733645809253848443133883865090859841783670033092312181110852389333100104508151212118167511579 times 1900871281664822113126851573935413975471896789968515493666638539088027103802104498957191261465571”).
You are right - I deliberately avoided the use of the term "useful statements" for this reason.
1) There are tautological statements
2) There are [insert word here] statements.
3) There are useful statements (these can be tautological, [insert word here], or false).
But we don't have a word for [insert word here]...well, prior to taking logic 101, laymen usually insert "true" into the slot, but for some reason we've decided to define the term "true" such that it refers to both tautologies and [insert word here], while neglecting to create a term exclusively for [insert word here].
That's my objection. Approaching [insert word here] is the goal of the sciences...we practically worship [insert word here], in a way that we do not worship tautologies. We aught to have a word that refers to it exclusively. I'd prefer that word to be "Truth", but then the mathematicians went and permanently broadened the meaning of that word, and now we can't have nice things anymore, so we need some other word.
“Empirically true statements”?
Informative?
See above discussion.
It's means: a statement which is true in our universe, but is not a tautology.
Right, I was suggesting the word 'informative'.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, there are a few candidates - "informative", "real", etc.
The trouble is that we are smashing through the layman's definition again. If we define "informative" as [insert word here], then we must also say that a calculus textbook is not at all informative.
Well, how about these tautologies: All green apples are green. All sunny days are days. All cats are cats.
All of those are true, and they accurately describe this (and every) universe.
I don't know if they drill anything into us: a tautology is just a technical term for a proposition that's true on every interpretation (that is, whatever 'cat' means in the above, the sentences is always true). This is just standard use, I'm not trying to defend it as the only possible answer to the question. But to say something like 'moral systems are tautological' as in the OP is sort of nonsensical. On the standard use of 'tautology' that statement is obviously false. And I don't know what non-standard use does better. We can use 'tautological' to mean anything we want, I'm just asking the OPoster "what are we using this word to mean?"
And all moral systems are, by definition, moral. (If they weren't, they'd be immoral systems!)
"Cats are cats" doesn't tell us anything about this universe. It doesn't tell us whether cats exist, it doesn't tell us what cats would be like if they did exist. It's just a self referencing label.
You can call it "true" if you want to use that definition of truth, but it isn't describing anything real.
I don't think that's true (and it doesn't sound like a tautology either). For example, Aristotle has a moral system, and in it, he endorses slavery. Suppose slavery is evil. From this, we can say 'his moral system, insofar as it endorses slavery, is evil'. Another way to put that would be 'Aristotle's moral system is immoral.'
Is that true? I think it's at least in the ball park. In any case, it's not a contradiction, which the denial of a tautology would be. It sounds to me like 'moral systems are tautological' is just kind of an incoherent claim. I can't even tell what the thought is supposed to be.
Oh, that's just a case of two words sounding the same (like "I can" vs "pick up the can").
Aristotle's moral[1] system is immoral [2].
Moral[1] - of or pertaining to good and bad
Moral[2] - good
"Aristotle's system of identifying good and bad is not good".
Ah! Okay, so the original claim should be read as something like "All good systems are tautological".
...Could you explain what that means?
Wait, how did you get from the original claim to there?
The original claim should go: "All moral[2] systems are good" or "All moral[1] systems lie somewhere on the spectrum of goodness and badness."
I mean, you could certainly argue that all "good systems are tautological", in a sense. You'd be saying that good and bad are defined solely by the speaker, and when I say that "murder is bad", it is only "bad" because I define it as so. What you'd really be saying is that all moral systems are tautological (as in, they do not represent objective statements about the universe, and are arbitrarily defined).
But that statement doesn't follow from the original claim, does it?
Well, the original claim I got confused about was this:
So do you think the original claim is saying that (to some extent) all moral statements are arbitrarily defined?
Yeah, I do think that is what the author meant.
The point that he is making is that even though morality is arbitrarily defined, it is important that moral systems map onto real world things.
For example, if you are a utilitarian you've arbitrarily decided that you want to maximize utility, But you aren't done yet - "increasing utility" has got to actually mean something. Where/what is the utility, in the real world? How can you know if you have increased or decreased net utility?
Or, if you are a religious person and are against "sin"... What does sin look like, in the real world? How can you measure sin? Etc....
Or, if you are a paper-clip maximizes...what exactly constitutes a paperclip?
There are no "utility" molecules, or "sin" molecules, or "paperclip" molecules. None of these things have coherent, ontologically fundamental definitions - they exist largely in your own head. You yourself must try to figure out what these things are in the real world, if you plan on using them in your moral systems.
In other words, there's got to be a conceptual umbilical chord connecting arbitrarily defined morality to things that happen in the world. It can't just be an abstract system ... it has to consider meat and neurons and circuits, it has to answer hard questions like "what is a person" and "what is pain and pleasure" before it's complete.
I think there may be a terminological dispute. Part of the most recent sequence discusses the distinction between true and valid.
In brief, the colloquial word "true" is overloaded. Defining true as "corresponds with reality" we recognize that mathematics and first order logic are not true in that sense. Instead, we should use the word valid.
Under that definition, tautologies are never true, they are only valid. Essentially, resurrecting logical positivism. I think the resurrection fails, so I'm unimpressed. But usage of that terminology is the best steelman I can see for Petruchio's post.
Fair enough. I also don't think this use of 'valid' is a good idea (how do we distinguish between sound mathematical arguments and, at the extreme, arguments that validly take contradictions for premises?). Also, what happened to dear old Tarski?
I guess the answer to my original question is 'yes, "tautology" is being used in a non-standard way'.