Except that setting aside moral claims (and other types of non-empirical claims) is not what happens. The moral claims have the property of providing an impetus of action which the empirical claim does not. There may be good empirical reasons to believe that education is an equalizer, but does nothing to drive behavior along the lines of "caring for the poor." That is, this belief becomes an isolated piece of information.

You are incorrect, and the reason is behind the language that you're using.

* What you mean by "truth claims about the universe"
* What you mean by "good evidence" and "logical argument"

As a result of the wording of the first case, I believe you are narrowing your perspective in a way that is inaccurately reflecting belief systems. Whether intentionally or not, you're narrowing the conversation to specifically beliefs that are formed in a correspondence framework, and not a coherence framework. (The "infinitely many primes" claim fits both -- coherence relative to some set of axioms, but also coherence if you take the position that mathematics is "real" in a certain sense, and that the claim represents a true statement about mathematical reality.)

So even though you're trying to frame general relativity as a coherence framework, because of its reliance upon empirical measurements, it's fundamentally a correspondence framework. The same thing applies to the POTUS.

Additional reading, if you are interested:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-coherence/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-correspondence/

Umm GR or "Obama is the POTUS" can be understood entirely in terms of a coherence framework. Or a correspondence framework. (Perhaps I should exclude the infinitely many primes example due to the ontological status question which puts a correspondence view [i presume you typoed and meant correspondence not coherence] into question). Namely, when one says evidence in a coherence framework one is maintain a proposition like the proposition "the orbit of mercury is such and such" and whether that corresponds to some fact in the universe is irrelevent. But then this proposition about the orbit of mercury has coherence with the propositions made by GR but not with NG. Similarly for logic, the truth of the proposition B has a coherence with propositions A and (if A then B). So no, the general point about using logic and evidence and the like stands in both a correspondence or a coherence understanding.

Earlier you said that the coherence you meant was essentially a noncontradiction and that "entailment is much harder". I didn't push back at the time as I was on my ipad and didn't want to do much microquoting, however I see now I should have. Harder, perhaps, but necessary. Almost everything you accept in the world, I suspect, you demand more than simply consistency. For example, the proposition that aliens exist and the proposition that aliens don't exist are, presumably, both consistent with your framework yet not both held as true by you. I have termed this previously as needing evidence or logic and the like, but yes entailment is probably the better, more general term. And I submit that for the most part, you DO demand some higher standard of entailment and not mere noncontradiction to accept a give proposition.

Except for religion. Your history of course demonstrates you inability or unwillingness to profess evidential or logic based justification for deistic statements. And here you have suggested that indeed entailment is "much harder" and seem satisfied with consistency. The schism remains unbreached.

This isn't entirely true. If it was, empiricism would not allow for contradictory models - which it does.

I think trying to shoehorn empiricism into either correspondence theory or coherence theory is doomed to fail. In modern empiricism it is even a typical assumption that nothing can be proven true, only "supported" or "falsified" - so the entire philosophical debate on "truth" is basically discarded.

It doesnt take a lot.

Since you say things like this about empiricism relatively often, I'll note that in my experience "modern empiricism" has certainly not discarded the philosophical debate on truth. Furthermore, I think it should be pointed out that the Popperian model of science as being demarcated from non-science because scientific claims are falsifiable has been mostly rejected (or regarded as incomplete) by contemporary philosophers of science.

I don't doubt that, but the reality is that the impact of "contemporary philosophers of science" on empiricism's actual application in science is minimal at best and probably dangerously close to zero - whereas Popper is pretty much referenced in every 101 method book on the planet.

Popper's empirical falsification is nice, because it allows me to ignore big ontological debates (which aren't going anywhere anyway) and instead focus on the world around us (whatever that might be or we might be). Zombie ants > P-Zombies, so to speak. I think my sentiment here is fairly typical.

As for the demarcation problem, I don't see how it plays into the context of this discussion. Even if we for some reason assumed/concluded that we couldn't differentiate "general relativity" from a non-scientific claim - it wouldn't change what Aaron said or what I replied.

Can be, yes. But that's not an accurate reflection of how *I* understand them. If I see a car in front of me, that observation is taken as a fact of reality. I don't take that as "my perception of the universe is that there is a car in front of me." I allow for the close connection between the personal experience of the universe and the state of the universe, and not everything needs to be processed through some form of coherence in order to be understood.

You're holding to your definition of "evidence" that I disagree with. That's all that needs to be said.

No. It's not necessary. In the realm of worldview considerations (which is the context of this conversation, and your continued attempts to abandon it presents a high likelihood that you don't actually understand what you think you understand), entailment is not necessary. There can be plenty of undecidable statements within a particular worldview, and this is fine. There can be new experiences that do not have an unambiguous interpretation in light of worldview, and this is also fine.

I've noted that you suspect incorrectly. Not all claims are processed in the same manner, nor are they all held in the same manner. My claim stands from before:

Your attempts to reduce worldview to a system of scientific (or science-like) statements is doomed to failure.

It's true that the scientific authority is related to my acceptance of the claim. But it's not a blind deference. For example, I reject many claims from evolutionary psychology, even though that would fall into the realm of scientific authority.

My point was that the truth or falsity of the existence of the Higgs boson is essentially irrelevant with regards to any sort of worldview understanding. That is, if the statement is either true or false, there's no work (by me) to be done to understand and interpret the claim. There are basically no connections that would need to be revisited, and coherence can be maintained in either case with no need to reinterpret or re-understand anything.

When *I* tried to frame GR in terms of a coherence framework you told me it was fundamentally a correspondence framework, but have now switched to agreeing with me that it can indeed be expressed as a coherence framework just that you personally don't do this. No matter, but the shift should be noted.

Anyways I must slightly change my criticism (although its essential character that you are privileging religious claims remains the same). I presumed when you typed out that big post about a coherence framework for your worldview, that this was how you understood everything (and hence was a worldview). My guess now is that you don't mean this. Namely, that when it comes to specifically religious claims (and perhaps moral claims...the exact boundaries are not clear to me) you use a coherence framework. However, when talking about everyday claims about the universe whether that is GR or who the POTUS is, you are not using the coherence framework but are instead using a correspondence framework. Before I thought you were privileging religion by using a very different standard of entailment within a coherence framework for different types of claims (requiring only non contradiction for religious claims, but certainly some stronger entailment for nonreligious claims). Now it seems like you are privileging religious by using an entirely different framework for understanding its claims about the universe and seem to think "fundamentally" that claims such as those made by GR are only understood by you correspondingly.


For completeness, can you clarify that you personally do not understand deistic statements as correspondences? Namely, that you don't think the truth value of the statement "god exists" corresponds with an objective fact about the universe? (I ask because if you did, you could abandon your coherence framework which you already can use for GR or who the POTUS is, and use a correspondence framework for everything). If you don't, I would wonder why not.




If consistency is all that is required to include a belief, then both aliens and not aliens are consistent and should both be held as true (or choose similar other example if you think one of those is contradictory in some way). What am I missing? if you include entailments, then I have a good notion of a what an "undecidable statement" is. Namely, it is a consistent statement without entailment from other statements. Ex aliens are an undecidable statement in my worldview; both existence and non existence is consistent, but I have no reason to believe either, so it is undecided.

So what I suspect going on here is that in the correspondence framework you use for most things, you DO maintain a much higher standard than mere consistency for including statements as true. Yet when it comes to religion, you have stuffed it into this separate coherence framework from what you use for everything else, and further are actively defending a coherence framework that doesn't make use of entailment. It all reads as sophistry to get around the essential problem about your inability to provide any shred of evidence of logical argument to support your deistic claims.

Oh huh apparently reading can be useful who knew. From your link:

My aliens and not aliens example is more or less this.

Are you discussing my framework? Or are you talking about yours? In context, you're talking about mine because you haven't presented anything as yours. And if you are talking about your own framework, then your comment is completely devoid of any context or meaning.

What you've done here is very typical of the way you approach conversations. You are very good at creating post hoc justifications for the things you say, and it doesn't really make sense or present yourself in a manner that gives the appearance of you actually desiring a conversation.

Not quite, but you're getting there. The coherence framework and the correspondence framework work together to create worldview.

What you define as "everyday claims about the universe" is a poorly defined category. I would not consider GR to be an "everyday claim."

(Edit: If it mattered in some technical sense, I wouldn't even call GR a "claim" but instead a "model" and "true" would be interpreted as "is an effective model for gravitational behavior" because that's the most reasonable interpretation of what it would mean for a model to be "true.")

Nope. The problem is that you're making very arbitrary categories and it's not making sense. You keep sounding like you want to have the ability to completely deconstruct worldview into logically independent pieces and rebuild the whole thing. It just doesn't work that way.

Eh? This question gives me the impression that you have really failed to understand much of what I've said.

Yeah... this makes no sense again.

You're missing overall coherence. As I noted, it would be fine if the Higgs boson existed or did not exist. However, it's not coherent for me to hold both at the same time.

The issue that you did not pick up on (which is not addressed in the part of the SEP article you quoted) is found in the following sentence:

The distinction between here and the SEP article is that in the relevant portion of the SEP article is defining "true" as consistency relative to a "specified set of propositions." With worldview, there's more to it. Things that are true in a worldview are not simply things that are consistent with the worldview. Again, Higgs boson existing and not existing would be consistent with my worldview, but this doesn't mean I hold both statements to be true. Yet neither claim could rightly be said to be "entailed by" my worldview.

Edit: Non-contradiction is a simple way of expressing the condition that other beliefs must cohere with each other without them being viewed as foundational worldview beliefs.

The statement here continues to demonstrate for me that you really haven't taken the time to understand me.

Frankly, the one making arbitrary categories is you. Very explicitly. You have one way of understanding things (correspondences) which given how it applies to both GR and who the POTUS is I suspect is most claims you make about the universe and use to operate in your daily life. Here you presumably believe you should apply logic and evidence to support claims. Yet when it comes to religious (and moral, the boundary of your arbitrary categories isn't clear) it isn't just that you openly apologize for not needing to provide evidence or logical arguments for the things you believe are true, you call for an entirely different understanding of what "true" means and use a coherence framework. Different domains, entirely different treatment from you.

And then we are led to believe that somehow (as you have given zero indication how) these entirely different frameworks just "work together" whatever that means.
The question is simple. I know you have stated that you can understand claims like "a deity exists" in a coherence framework. However, as I demonstrated with GR many claims are not exclusively understandable by just one of these possible frameworks. So the question is whether you think that "a deity exists" is understandable under the correspondence notion of truth. i submit it is, incidentally. The reason I ask is that since you are already understanding GR and who the POTUS is as a correspondence framework, if you could ALSO understand your religious claims in this manner, you could just view everything entirely under the one framework which would avoid this jarring inconsistency in your presentation.
Bolded is correct. Holding both is a contradiction. Yet, looking at each separately they are both consistent with your coherence with your framework and hence - by your definition of the coherence relation being nothing else but consistency - are both held as true. This is a fundamental problem with a coherence framework that only maintains consistency as its coherence relation. Which is why those people who support coherence frameworks (as opposed to correspondence frameworks, you seem to want to support both in different contexts) instead demand a stronger coherence relation, namely entailment. In which case we believe the Higgs Boson is true because it follows from other propositions which we hold as true but do not believe it is false because this entailment does not exist.
I am confused by the bolded. I certainly agree that there is a privileged set which you have termed "foundational worldview beliefs" and presumably includes statements like "a deity exists". However, you told me that coherence meant "primarily noncontradiction" but you are now telling me that it is NOT simply consistency. So which of these two is it? My argument is that indeed entailment is going to be necessary to admit claims as true and at first I thought you disagreed but the bolded seems to imply you agree.

I would also suggest that you give, as rigoursly as possible, a definition of what you think a "worldview" is. So far it seems to be some unspecified amalgamation of both a coherence and a correspondence framework for truth.

I was presenting my understanding of how GR fits into a coherence framework and explicitly asked if you agreed with it or not. You told me, however, that it FUNDAMENTALLY is a correspondence framework. Not that you personally don't think this, that it fundamentally is not a coherence framework. Then in the next post you acknowledge that this is not true, that GR CAN be understood, as I suggested, as a coherence framework it is just that you personally don't do that. Whatever. At the very least, this is very poor word usage from you.

There isn't "the methodology" but there is "the Way" through Yeshua HaMashiach ( "Christ Jesus" ) ; every other way is no way at all.

The answer is faith.

It doesn't have any science or methodology, those who believe have no use for such things.

You don't believe all religious claims are true, just some subset of them. Even if we stick within Christianity there is enormous fragmentation and diversity of claims made. So even if you believe various claims "on faith" (which I presume means you are unable to provide supporting evidence or rational justification), how do you decide WHICH of these claims to believe on faith?

Whichever ones you have faith in.

That's a pretty impressive epistemology.

I know, not saying it's what I believe but....

It's two different languages/systems. The atheist scientists want evidence, and the theists have faith.

I don't think that's quite right. There are plenty of theistic scientists who would claim they have evidence.

Interesting, evidence of what?

I don't think many of the theists here are going to sign-off on such a transparently circular 'way of knowing': that the way to know that e.g. Christ is the son of God is to believe that Christ is the son of God.

I beg to differ. Unless there is some sort of scientfic method evidence of said possible mythical beings ever having existed. If I/you see what I mean?

Disclaimer: I have no particular belief/non belief in the scientific method or the supernatual.

No I don't see what you mean. Sounds like a (potentially) false dichotomy to me. Can you go into a bit more detail?

Philosophically, you cannot prove the existence/non existence of God. AFAIK there is no scientific or historical evidence for god. That leaves us with faith to go on.