Semantics != Philosophy
 

Ok I just saw the thread: Is "I am agnostic" a valid answer to "Do you beleive in god?"
Now, seriously, I've seen other threads just like this. It all comes down to semantics, the meaning of words to define what exactly people are saying. This is not philosophy.

Philosophy is "Here is my theory on how humans communify" or "Religion: a crutch for the weak."

This is my observation. Some of you don't seem to be taking philosophy too seriously.

Whilst I agree there can be a lot of rubbish around; we spent a hell of a lot of time learning about semantics/logic etc when I studied philosophy at university. Whilst you could argue it's not philosophy in itself, you certainly need it to understand philosophy.

Take the "Do you believe in God/I am an agnostic" question. I've heard it argued that if by "I'm agnostic" you mean "There possibly is a god" causes logical hassles (using possible-worlds semantics here) as (assumption) God is beyond possible worlds - hence the statement implies he exists necessarily.

But you can counter that by saying "I'm agnostic" means "I don't know" (which it does, literally!)

So I think semantics is pretty important; at least I'd like to think that the 1/3 of my course spent studying it was worthwhile!

(ps - replies about agnosticism here please :). I'm sure semantics discussions are allowed in this thread though)

Arguments about the existence of god:

"Do you believe in freedom? becase a belief in God is exactly the same thing" - This constitutes a classic example of arguing about semantics.

I find it very frustrating trying to get around "the language barrier"...to try and probe beyond its limitations, yet other people seem to revel in this silly linguistic nonsense.

this can all be avoided if we all just include the symbolic logical representation with each of our arguments ;)

phukraut - and define the symbols with what? :) Then again, you're probably right - but I'd go one further and remove the argument itself. Just leave the symbols and people can go around having petty arguments like:

> (A & B) -> C
> A
> B
> ergo C

n0 way man WTF!!!! j00 R r0ng.
ergo (not) C

(big ;) )

ultimately, i think i might have to disagree, halx. while sematics fights are usually fairly uninteresting for those not involved, it's because we're trying to get at the truth we have concluded, guessed at, figured out, rationalized, discovered, etc... and conveying that requires language...and language entails mess. And so discussions like that arise....

using logical equations helps to understand an arguments structure, but does not help with semantics (in my experience, anyway). The whole difficulty with semantics is assigning abstract meaning to a string of characters, and then achieving universal understanding and agreement on how to reinterpret those symbols. no matter how much you distill an argument into its basic form, real-life application will thwart any attempts to resolve semantics.

or else... thats what i think :)

I don't mind the semantics debates. Like Cliche said, it's an important part of philosophy. We need to make sure we're all talking about the same thing, and occasionally some very interesting philosophical discussions start out as semantics.

Well, the great mathematician Kurt Godel did that. With great success. Granted, approximately ten people alive on Earth know what he was talking about, but still.

What good is philosophy if you cannot explain it or defend it in concrete terms? Unless you are an isolated hermit pursuing knowledge for its own sake without any intention of passing it on to others, semantics will come into play at some point.

Semantics is annoying to many people (myself included), but in my case it is so because of a lack of ability on my part to explain or define exactly what I am thinking. "Come on, you know what I mean," isn't a valid response in a philosophical argument. What constitutes a logical proof? If you can poke holes in my argument through the wording of my explanations, this is probably indication that some sort of logical flaw exists somewhere.

Of course, we could simply argue that all of this is armchair philosophy and therefore inately useless to begin with, so who gives a fuck anyway.

When you get down to it...it's ALL semantics.

Everyone has different definitions,
and those definitions are based on others, plus experience and biases, etc.

This is where the debate comes in.

Philosophy is just the categorization of different beliefs & ideas,
this allows us to grasp or model these abstracts a little better.
However, even within this...there is much leyway & crossover.

The problem here isn't so much that there's a discussion about semantics at all, IMHO, it's that some people *only* argue about semantics, and think that's all there is to philosophy.

A now-pretty-much-extinct group of philosophers in the UK tried this approach in the 60s/70s, and failed to accomplish anything whatsoever.

(Oh, and I'm back again. Just figured that out my router has been blocking this site for weeks now... :) )

Here, without a doubt, is the best of philosophy in webspace. Read and observe an incredible thinker. I would trade everything else I encountered on the web for this link. The superlatives are appropriate. http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/believer.html

That's a great idea. Now if I can only find that damned intersect key...

Seriously, though, considering the first commercial computers would've largely been made by maths or logic grads, it's quite surprising that nobody found room on the keymap for all the basic logic symbols.

Could a logically-correct, ambiguity-free language even be devised? Much like the universality of languages such as Esperanto.

All the logic symbols are in upper ASCII but just not on our keyboards - they are based on key use frequency. {Yes.}

prolog is a logically correct and unambiguous language.

is there something wrong with using /\ and \/ ?

The English language does a pretty good job of pinning thoughts and ideas down with a high degree of precision. Some people just hide behind semantics to avoid fully engaging in the debate. Of greater concern to me is contsantly falling standards of grammar. Now you may find this petty BUT if meaning gets any more blurred and precision is not maintained then the standard of debate will fall and we will all just shout 'its all semantics'!

Yeah, it's not immediately obvious what they mean.

You mean, rewriting math from scratch, using purely symbolic logic?

I thought that was B. Russel who did that. Godel was the guy who figured out that sufficiently powerful consistent formal systems are incomplete.

This is the tarpit of "turing equivilence" or "moral relativity".

As far as computer scientists can tell, all computers and programming languages are essentially equivilent. Any problem one language or computer can solve, another can solve given enough time.

In practice, however, this isn't true. Because the defininition of "equivilent" here is very loose, and "enough time" can be an extremely huge amount of time.

The "Turing Tarpit" is what happens when people take the equivilence of languages and computers, and claim that it proves that languages are all the same.

They aren't.

While different cultures have different moral/ethical systems, it doesn't mean they are all interchangeable.

While Philosophy catagorizes beliefs and ideas, it doesn't mean the ideas and beliefs are interchangeable.

It is called symbolic math. And the problem is, while people think a particular symbol means true, how can we really know? =)

is it immediately obvious what the word "the" means?

Yes, to anyone who can read, if you represent it as 'the'. I'm not quarreling with phukraut about using symbols for disjunction and conjunction, I just meant that if I saw them represented like that, I wouldn't immediately identify what they were.

my fault: i was responding to the lack of these symbols on the standard keyboard. that's all.