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Creutzer comments on Open thread, July 28 - August 3, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Sorry for being nit-picky, but that is partly linguistic illiteracy on Salviati's part. Natural language conditionals are not assertible if their antecedent is false. Thus, by asserting "If A then B", he implies that A is possible, with which Simiplicio might reasonably disagree.
It depends why Salvati is bringing it up.
"If X(t), then A(t+delta). If A(t') then B(t'+delta')."
"But, not A(now)!"
Even with such a generic conditional (where t and t' are, effectively, universally quantified), the response can make sense with the following implied point: So not "B(now+delta')", hence we can't draw any presently relevant conclusions from your statement, so why are you saying this?
It may or may not be appropriate to dispute the relevance of the conditional in this way, depending on the conversational situation.
Let me rephrase that with more words:
"If we do X, then A will happen. If A happens, then B happens."
"But A isn't happening."
Can you give a quick example with the blanks filled in? I'm interested, but I'm not sure I follow.
A: If John comes to the party, Mary will be happy. (So there is a chance that Mary will be happy.)
B: But John isn't going to the party. (So your argument is invalid.)
That's what the subjunctive is for. If A had said “If Jon came to the party, Mary would be happy”, ...
The same thing can still happen with a subjunctive conditional, though.
A: If John came to the party, Mary would be happy. (So we could make Mary happy by making John come to the party.) B: But John isn't going to the party, no matter what we do. (So your argument is invalid.)
Also, pace George R. R. Martin, the name is still spelled John. Sorry, no offense, I just couldn't resist. :)
Jon -- short for Jonathan -- was a perfectly good name long before George R R Martin.
Ah, thanks. I didn't know that existed as a short form for Jonathan, and inferred that it was merely another instance of his distorting English spelling in names and titles.
Usually in these exchanges the truth value of A is under dispute. But it is nevertheless possible to make arguments with uncertain premises to see if the argument actually succeeds given its premises.
"But A isn't true" is also a common response to counterfactual conditionals - especially in thought experiments.
Well, sometimes thought-experiments are dirty tricks and merit having their premises dismissed.
"If X, Y, and Z were all true, wouldn't that mean we should kill all the coders?"
"Well, hypothetically, but none of X, Y, and Z are true."
"Aha! So you concede that there are certain circumstances under which we should kill all the coders!"
My preferred answer being:
"I can't occupy the epistemic state that you suggest — namely, knowing that X, Y, and Z are true with sufficient confidence to kill all the coders. If I ended up believing X, Y, and Z, it's more likely that I'd hallucinated the evidence or been fooled than that killing all the coders is actually a good idea. Therefore, regardless of whether X, Y, and Z seem true to me, I can't conclude that we should kill all the coders."
But that's a lot more subtle than the thought-experiment, and probably constitutes fucking tedious in a lot of social contexts. The simplified version "But killing is wrong, and we shouldn't do wrong things!" is alas not terribly convincing to people who don't agree with the premise already.
There are other ways of saying it. I think Iain Banks said it pretty well.