I. Our Mysterious Love of Stories People like stories, especially children. The bestseller lists are regularly dominated by fiction. There is something puzzling about this: these are, in a sense, books full of lies. None of what they say is true, and we know that up front. We read them for fun, not education. But why are we made such that we would enjoy consuming long accounts of events that never happened?
Interesting. To add, compelling stories are sometimes not just psychologically realistic, but exaggerating real traits people have to make their point clear. For example, historical nobles in medieval Europe were not nearly as treasonous as their counterparts in Game of Thrones.
Have you yet been invited to appear on Micah Siegel's Nature's Guardians podcast to discuss your book Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism?
I enjoy reading your books and articles. But sometimes, assuming I don't misinterpret your words, I disagree with something you say. If we genuinely disagree, we can't both be right. Since you're a professional philosopher and I'm just an amateur, it seems antecedently likely that the error is mine. But I'm seldom able to discover my mistakes.
For example, in today's Fake Nous article you make two claims I find implausible: (1) books of fiction “are, in a sense, books of lies” and (2) “there are counterexamples to everything, including this”.
I'll take claim (2) first. I assume by “this” you are referring to what it seems to you that stories have in common stated in the previous paragraph, not claim (2), itself; otherwise, you'd be contradicting yourself. Even so, it appears that your claim can't avoid contradiction. For the claim that there are counterexamples to everything implies that there are counterexamples to that claim itself. If there is even one counterexample to that claim, then there must be something to which there is no counterexample, which contradicts the claim that there are counterexamples to everything. Where have I made my mistake?
I also find it implausible that books of fiction are “in a sense, books of lies.” Commonly, “lie” is taken to mean a statement, typically expressed as a declarative sentence, known or believed to be untrue by the person who expresses it with the intent to deceive some other person. Although declarative sentences in books of fiction may be untrue, it seems implausible that their authors intend to deceive their readers into believing those statements are true. I think an invention of the imagination expressed as a statement believed to be untrue but without intent to deceive anyone into accepting it as true could be better called a fiction. There is support for that view: The distinction between a lie and a fiction can be used to solve the type of liar paradox generated by such a sentence as “What I'm now saying is a lie.” Since the quoted sentence is a fiction, arguments that attempt to assign it a truth value don't lead to the conclusion that it's a lie if and only if it's not a lie. So, in what sense are declarative sentences in works of fiction lies?
Incidentally, a different distinction is required in order to adequately solve the more problematic type of liar paradox generated by sentences that mention truth or falsity, such as “This sentence is false” and “This sentence is not true”. Several people have, apparently independently, solved that type of liar paradox, none of whom I found mentioned in the References section of Paradox Lost. But all published only what I call the basic solution, which involves describing the fallacy that accounts for paradox and avoiding contradiction. The basic solution hasn't become generally accepted because it's inadequate. I possess a 10-item list of requirements of an adequate solution, which I'm willing to send you by private email if you want it. To my knowledge no one has published an adequate solution, but at least one unpublished such solution exists. Philosophers who have attempted to solve the liar paradox have often thought the paradox results from some defect in natural language, classical logic, or the ordinary notion of truth. That the solution just mentioned solves the paradox in natural language using classical logic (together with conceptual analysis) shows that the paradox doesn't arise due to some defect in language or logic.
Also, the paradox doesn't indicate a defect in the ordinary notion of truth but in the theories of truth most philosophers accept. The correct theory not only solves the liar paradox and some related problems, it explains in what way normative sentences can be truth apt. In Ethical Intuitionism you give good reasons to believe that normative statements can be truth apt but you don't explain in what way they can be truth apt. The positive statement “Snow is white” seems to be true in the correspondence sense, but the normative statement “It's wrong to torture infants” seems to be true in a different way. You can't observe the wrongness of an act in the way you can observe the whiteness of snow.
Interesting. To add, compelling stories are sometimes not just psychologically realistic, but exaggerating real traits people have to make their point clear. For example, historical nobles in medieval Europe were not nearly as treasonous as their counterparts in Game of Thrones.
Dr. Huemer,
Have you yet been invited to appear on Micah Siegel's Nature's Guardians podcast to discuss your book Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism?
I enjoy reading your books and articles. But sometimes, assuming I don't misinterpret your words, I disagree with something you say. If we genuinely disagree, we can't both be right. Since you're a professional philosopher and I'm just an amateur, it seems antecedently likely that the error is mine. But I'm seldom able to discover my mistakes.
For example, in today's Fake Nous article you make two claims I find implausible: (1) books of fiction “are, in a sense, books of lies” and (2) “there are counterexamples to everything, including this”.
I'll take claim (2) first. I assume by “this” you are referring to what it seems to you that stories have in common stated in the previous paragraph, not claim (2), itself; otherwise, you'd be contradicting yourself. Even so, it appears that your claim can't avoid contradiction. For the claim that there are counterexamples to everything implies that there are counterexamples to that claim itself. If there is even one counterexample to that claim, then there must be something to which there is no counterexample, which contradicts the claim that there are counterexamples to everything. Where have I made my mistake?
I also find it implausible that books of fiction are “in a sense, books of lies.” Commonly, “lie” is taken to mean a statement, typically expressed as a declarative sentence, known or believed to be untrue by the person who expresses it with the intent to deceive some other person. Although declarative sentences in books of fiction may be untrue, it seems implausible that their authors intend to deceive their readers into believing those statements are true. I think an invention of the imagination expressed as a statement believed to be untrue but without intent to deceive anyone into accepting it as true could be better called a fiction. There is support for that view: The distinction between a lie and a fiction can be used to solve the type of liar paradox generated by such a sentence as “What I'm now saying is a lie.” Since the quoted sentence is a fiction, arguments that attempt to assign it a truth value don't lead to the conclusion that it's a lie if and only if it's not a lie. So, in what sense are declarative sentences in works of fiction lies?
Incidentally, a different distinction is required in order to adequately solve the more problematic type of liar paradox generated by sentences that mention truth or falsity, such as “This sentence is false” and “This sentence is not true”. Several people have, apparently independently, solved that type of liar paradox, none of whom I found mentioned in the References section of Paradox Lost. But all published only what I call the basic solution, which involves describing the fallacy that accounts for paradox and avoiding contradiction. The basic solution hasn't become generally accepted because it's inadequate. I possess a 10-item list of requirements of an adequate solution, which I'm willing to send you by private email if you want it. To my knowledge no one has published an adequate solution, but at least one unpublished such solution exists. Philosophers who have attempted to solve the liar paradox have often thought the paradox results from some defect in natural language, classical logic, or the ordinary notion of truth. That the solution just mentioned solves the paradox in natural language using classical logic (together with conceptual analysis) shows that the paradox doesn't arise due to some defect in language or logic.
Also, the paradox doesn't indicate a defect in the ordinary notion of truth but in the theories of truth most philosophers accept. The correct theory not only solves the liar paradox and some related problems, it explains in what way normative sentences can be truth apt. In Ethical Intuitionism you give good reasons to believe that normative statements can be truth apt but you don't explain in what way they can be truth apt. The positive statement “Snow is white” seems to be true in the correspondence sense, but the normative statement “It's wrong to torture infants” seems to be true in a different way. You can't observe the wrongness of an act in the way you can observe the whiteness of snow.
Dr. Huemer hasn't replied.