sewi li lon anu seme ?

[janKipo]

I not quite sure what to make of this discussion, which seems to have gone from a serious quest for arguments to a mere practical appeal to understand what theist and atheists believe. I personally don't know many actual theists who believe all this big three stuff in any detail and rather prefer a personal deity in some loose and ill-defined sense, who has their best interests at heart and makes the best possible use of the crap the universe has handed him (admittedly allowing that he made that universe, but these two notions tend not to get together often). The atheist generally just rejects the personal part (and all the funny stories about talking snakes and the like) and points out that,if someone is looking out for our welfare, his is doing a really bad job and theist talk leads us to expect better, and so is incoherent. So we are down to psychotherapy or the sociology of religion, which is just not that interesting (there are too many nut cases). Basically, go do what you want but don't try to force anyone else to do it -- and don't expect others to pay for your program.

[loteni]

hmm ? Well I'm not much interested in nonsense stuff. But this is about that argument, I was concluding the discussion about it. Since it had run its course.

I feel the toki pona version of this needs a little work though. It is not defined clearly enough, and doesnt really adequately express the logic of the original argument in standard form. Although upon inspection it is good enough for a starting point.

The argument itself doesn't really have any objections, it just boils down to pointless claims about how certain premise 1 is. However it does have utility in helping the atheist come to terms with how God is reasoned about in philosophy.

[loteni]

This post was merely a first attempt at exploring the scope of philosophical argument presentation in toki pona. I greatly thank you for engaging with me about it

Obviously the A la B, makes lots of simple syllogisms trivially easy to express, and I am interested in what else is easy, ok, a bit tricky or really hard to express naturally in toki pona WRT to standard form arguments like this

[janKipo]

tp lacks (so far) the means to make fine distinctions in scope (between 'not p' and 'not-p', for example, or what all is included in a 'ken la'). this makes many arguments (the modal version of the ontological in particular) difficult to state correctly. The valid atheist argument fares somewhat better, and the generally invalid theist arguments don't suffer much since they are pretty bad in any form.

Of course, as a person who has owned 36 different translations of DDJ, I tend to think of all these arguments as at best exercises in formal theory construction with no relation whatsoever to a religious life or even a viable belief system.

[loteni]

tp lacks these distinctions probably only as much as most other languages. p, p ala... p, not p... its the same in english and tp. ken seems even better suited to the modal technical usage than our english "probably/permissible".

Words just are used differently in the context of different areas. This is clearly and universally understood, commonly a computer is a specific device with certain properties, if I pointed to a rock and said, "that is a computer", well people would think I am making a claim that is something like; that is a desktop computer disguised as a rock. In physics people understand I'm making a much weaker and simpler claim.

You go on to make a distinction between "valid atheist arguments" and "invalid theist arguments". You seem fundamentally confused on this issue. Validity just is a property of the form of the argument. There just are no invalid arguments in philosophy, these are deleted from that field. Sure sometimes people in this field take a little time to realise some complex argument is actually invalid, but claiming they are invalid is itself invalid, you need to show they are invalid so we can throw them out. And anyway it is, for the most part exceedingly simple to see if an argument is actually invalid today.

Maybe you are talking about "arguments" among people lacking necessary skills, to present arguments in a valid form. Obviously statements from that perspective are as useful as statements of physics from the perspective of a superman comic.

You go on to assert your ownership of a multitude of translations of DDJ, and then following that you tend to think of these arguments... X
Again my ownership of a multitude of superman comics, may tend me towards a certain conception of arguments in physics, but this only has baring on my own issues of category misappropriation.

[janKipo]

I admire your confidence in the rationality of Philosophy. After 60 years in the field, I am much less confident of even common sense, let alone rationality, playing any role (two classic cases: the most obscure philosophical essay I ever read -- and I did Hegel in German -- was called "How to make our ideas clear", and a famous logician once wrote a paper that proved conclusively that substitutional quantification was the best way to do metalogic, but claimed forever after that the paper has utterly destroyed the possibility of using substitutional quantification). Since all of the classic arguments in Philosophy of Religion are still around and espoused and are still invalid -- even in various gussied up versions , invalid arguments are still around. Since the atheist argument is still valid, though roundly attacked (but mainly, admittedly, on grounds of soundness), valid arguments are not sure of a high regard. As noted, however, none of this seems to me to be very significant for any interesting questions about God.

My point about the DDJ was simply to point out that I tend to think in terms of apophatic theology and thus think that, even if there were an argument that proved that some effable notion of god were instantiated, this would have little significance about the existence of God (to use a handy, but misleading, expression). Hardly a mistake in categories.

As for the utility of tp for formal arguments, try translating a wff into tp. It is a pain in English (even in Lojban, alas) but I haven't been able to do it in tp at all except for very simple cases and I have been doing this sort of thing (in a variety -- though not great --of languages) for 60 years. It can be done, of course, in one sense, since every sentence descends from a wff, but keeping all the distinctions that are crucial is still too tricky for me.

If you want to be careful with language, you will note that only arguments, not statements, are (in)valid (and only statements, not arguments, are (un)true).

[loteni]

Of course, if the set of core propositions you want to hold mean that reasoning about things becomes impossible, then they are the beaks, this is the atheist dilemma. On the other hand if your worldview allows coherent reasoning then philosophy will be much more constructive than destructive of harmony of thought, knowledge and actions.

Since we both know what "invalid" means and "false/truth" WRT to these issues. I am obviously referring to statements around and with a certain statement or the statement itself implying an argument, when say such and such is invalid. And you should not use the term "invalid" to label current in use theist arguments or valid to label in distinction the current in use atheistic ones, the term you are looking for is "sound".. In your opinion there is a false premise or something, others are free to believe, using their own reasoning that said premise is true.

Since we with have "lon", "lawa", "la", "insa" I don't not think, "WFF" (well formed formulae) is not necessarily going to be particularly difficult to express, in TP. Although off the top of my head in this moment, I can only think of crude and ambiguous ways to point to such a notion.
The problem though, with issues such as this, is this; we tend to develop a formal language to express these things anyway, in english as in other natural languages we merely have notes, introductions, descriptive notions about various terms, as we introduce/define a formal language that is actually used to properly define the terms. So the only real issue is; if it is possible to adequately describe in TP enough of the terms to bootstrap the formalism, a much easier task.

[janKipo]

Actually, in most cases, when the theist arguments are fully spelled out, they are technically invalid. although some of their premises are also probably false as well. The atheist argument is valid but has arguably false (not to say risible) premises. But I am content with "unsound", since that is quite enough to feel free to ignore them (as, of course, most religious people do anyhow).

Belief, of course, is another matter altogether, since it does not require arguments or even facts (as witness modern politics). As is usual in moral situations, so in the case of beliefs: arguments are created to shore up the belief, not to create it in the first place. And so, as long as the arguments are truthy (look plausible on first sight), they work fine for their purpose. I don't know anything about God and know that I don't, but I have a lot of beliefs about gee. I don't argue for the truth of these beliefs, though I do occasionally argue for their usefulness, which seems to me to be the whole point in the long run.

The scope problems in tp are (at present) just about insurmountable. I keep working on them, but there are no guidelines and several suggestions that seem to prevent obvious moves ('ala la' for example). As you note, we need to develop a jargon in tp for formal logic (an informal, for that matter) and there is not a lot of material to work with. Just doing linguistics is pretty hard. But please make a stab at it.

[loteni]

Actually, in most cases - what do you mean by this ? If you are talking about common everyday arguments, people make, that do not know much about logic, then yeah, but you would expect that, and it applies to atheistic arguments as well.
Lets assume you are not saying something so meaningless, and are referring to actual arguments, then no; there's a boat load of valid theistic arguments. You mention "The atheist argument", this leds me to think you only know of one; the problem of evil. Well there are a lot more and the problem of evil is considered useless nowadays, although newer forms of it have arisen... they are pretty weak, and not really so popular today.

Belief ? You may yourself and also project to others a notion of irrational belief. I do not do that, I prefer rational belief based on reason and evidence. I think well enough of others to assume they base their beliefs this way also. Arguments are used for many purposes, note politicians who make up arguments to convince the voters to believe something they currently don't.

I'm pretty new to toki pona, I use the official book to guide me. I have ran into numerous problems and issues, and find that if I look in the book I find Sonja has already solved the problem. I think if you held the book in higher regard, your problems would be lessened to a large extent.

I am planning to attempt to express a lot more technical stuff that would usually require jargon or an already agreed different usage of words in that domain. I suppose I am about 20%, maybe less of the way through learning the official language at the moment. Many things I cannot express very well with such limited knowledge of the official language. Once I have either learnt enough to express that, I will, or if when I finish learning the official language, I will just have to try my best if there is no simple way to do that.

I suspect these things are included in the official language, because of how rich it is so far, but I will have to wait until I finish learning everything from the book, until I know for sure.

[loteni]

mm ?

Are you breaking the fundamental rule of communication ? That would explain your comments and your lack of understanding of Sonjas book.

The fundamental rule is to interpret what is said in the best possible way. You know it is kind of illegal not to ?

If someone conversationally gives an argument, that can be interpreted to be invalid. If you interpret it to be invalid, you are the one that has made a mistake. I would have thought you would know this ?
The only time you can validly interpret it to be invalid, is if you cannot find a valid interpretation. Then you merely ask; "heh, it seems to me, you are stating such and such, and isn't that invalid?". Where they would answer, "No, what I tried to convey was not that, but this", or "Oh, my mistake, yeah that argument doesn't work"
This maybe why you think the problem of evil argument is good, since it only works if you interpret the properties of God invalidly.