I see the is-ought problem as best described as just that, a problem, one that Hume identified.
But Matti, I think my question here is, do the insights you've found studying Putnam and the others now allow you to logically justify a value only from empirical data? If so a demonstration of that, or a citation of a successful attempt, seems like it would be very interesting.
Mike, I thought I replied to this in my thread. I’ll never understand Substack. Anyway, I repeat my response: Thanks for reading this. And it appears that you read all three parts. That is a very good question Mike. I really mean that. It’s a concern I’m sure many who read these posts share. That is, as you ask, can we “justify a value only from empirical data?” The same question or challenge you presented in your very first comment to Part I—“to convincingly demonstrate a value derived from a valueless fact.”
I wish I could give you a glib and convincing answer. I’m afraid my response will be unsatisfactory. As I said determining the source or sources of moral value itself is important. However, that is a separate task. My focus was that Hume’s guillotine is not the one-size-fits-all trump card that so many think it is. It had to be confronted for the confused muddle that it is. But that does not mean that I nor any of the philosophers I quoted—Putnam, Searle, Kovesi—or the many others who have mounted trenchant refutations of Hume like, for example, MacIntyre, Midgley, and Foot, are prepared to adopt his muddled linguistic framework and pull a rabbit out of that confused hat. That’s never going to happen. In short, this argument is not a set up for doing so. It’s simply a rejection of the whole set up. It’s useless. It has to be put aside.
I point to the argument of Part II. Let me add that in his breakthrough work, Beyond Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that in our practical everyday life we commonly agree on the “good” in actions and roles—a good carpenter, a good quarterback, a good father, etc. This parallels Searle’s “status function” or theory-laden factual descriptions. It also reminds us of Kovesi’s argument that “evaluation” is simply a function of “description.” Sure, there are debates around the margins but our language functions normatively unlike Hume’s insistence on a reality of only brute empirical facts. That is, our language includes normative standards. And, most importantly, that is part of our reality every bit as much as a piece of colored paper is also money! Again, there was no intention to get into the source or sources of moral standards. It’s just a rebuttal to Hume. I hope to tackle that other hard task at a later date.
In the very beginning I spoke about the psychological principle of belief perseverance. Without doubt Hume’s confused theory of facts and factual descriptions along with his strict dichotomy definitely has strong belief perseverance. It’s a lot like a sacred ritual (I called it a sideshow) and it has nothing to do with the proper study of ethics. I will say that challenging one’s understanding on this is, for many people, asking a lot. But Hume is dead wrong and this was a (too short) summary of some of the basic arguments why his rule is a useless confused muddle.
Thanks for your detailed thoughts Matti. My issue is I'm not seeing a refutation of Hume here, at least not the problem he identified. (I have to admit I didn't parse Part II as well as I should have. Maybe I missed something there.)
A lot of it seems more aimed at challenging his use of the word "fact." Fair enough. But then revising that term and saying he was wrong about the relation of values to the revised version of "fact" doesn't seem to be getting at the problem he actually identified, that we can't use the gold standard of scientific evidence, empirical observation, to justify a value. To the arguments the philosophers you quoted made, maybe we can make use of some theory development practices, but without the empirical check, that still seems more philosophy than science.
As always, I appreciate people trying to find a solution to this. Maybe there is one. But if so, I haven't seen it yet. It seems like a lot of opinions all around the issue without focusing on the core problem. But maybe I'm missing something?
Well, I did predict that you two were going to be tough nuts to crack! You certainly do not disappoint! Thanks for the constant challenge. I’ll need another cup of coffee to tackle Eric’s recent opus though! ;-)
Mike, I genuinely appreciate your honest approach to this. For me it took years of reading and thinking. It’s not easy. I remember when I drove a vehicle for the first time in the UK; I very often got into deep trouble. Those right turns nearly did me in. The mind likes to follow comfortable patterns. They seem so true. I should point out that insights gained from Wittgenstein, especially the further development of that important linguistic turn in philosophy by J. L. Austin and his students were a big help for me. I quoted two of Austin’s students, Searle and Kovesi. I was also deeply influenced by those ground-breaking women permitted to attend Oxford during the war years—Anscombe, Midgley, Foot and Murdock. They courageously fought the legions of A. J. Ayer inspired positivists and, in my opinion, deserve the lion’s share of credit in reviving Virtue Ethics. Mike, I savor our chats. Thanks for hanging in there.
I like the way you’re thinking there Mike! But then that’s more a project of mine than Matti’s. Since childhood my theory has been that value exists as feeling good rather than bad. As an adult I worked this out much further. Just as the computers that we build are energy driven, the brains that evolved are energy driven too. Consciousness however resides effectively as a value driven second form of computer that our brains evolved to implement. I’m at least beginning to become satisfied with my electromagnetic consciousness/value post where I lay this out quite simply, as well as propose how this could be confirmed or denied empirically. It’s strange how things have worked out. While I began by thinking Matti was trying to lead us into becoming moral realists, it turns out that by discrediting Hume’s “is-ought” muddle he was actually setting the table for me!
I'll ask you the same question. You seem to be basing your utilitarianism (which as I recall you don't like calling utilitarianism) on good feelings. Fair enough. But how would you logically justify good feelings as a value using no other values, just empirical data?
What I don’t like about utilitarianism is that it’s explicitly a moral theory, or about a judged rightness to wrongness of behavior. That gets into all sorts of social matters — the norms of behavior and whatnot. More basic that morality is the concept of value itself, or the goodness to badness of existing. My sense is that the field of philosophy has essentially ignored this more basic idea thus leaving the higher concept of morality to remain inherently speculative or “philosophical”.
To me that sets things up for your question. As I see it people in academia have only worried about the concept of values (plural). What I’m talking about is the beginning concept of value in itself by which the rest emerge. I’m talking about the physics of value. And how does non value physics create value physics? I don’t mind calling this “a hard problem” that I don’t expect humanity to ever truly make sense of. But as a naturalist I presume systemic causality does answer this question in the end. If my EMF testing proposal bears this theory out then I think things should become more plain. I think people would eventually say “So value resides by means of this sort of physics, not that we grasp exactly why”. Then from my perspective ideally the field of psychology would become founded upon value just as economics already is and so begin developing effective general models of our nature. I think it would eventually even reduce our various moral notions to theory of mind sensations like “envy” and the care sensitivity we feel for others. That’s probably ambitious for now though.
So moral values don't exist? And value in general is a "hard problem"? It seems like the only difference you have with Hume is you think there is a fact of the matter (for non-moral values), but you don't expect us to ever be able to justify it. If so, I'm not sure you're necessarily in Matti's camp here.
In any case, it seems like the gap Hume identified still exists for you. Or at least I don't see a solution to it here. Unless I'm missing it?
I certainly didn’t say that moral values don’t exist Mike. I said there’s something more fundamental that they emerge from. This would be value in itself, or the goodness to badness of existing as anything. Without this there’d be no morality. Conversely morality needn’t exist just because value exists. And what constitutes the value of existing for anything? I believe it’s how good to bad something feels from moment to moment. Theoretically this is the fuel which drives the conscious form of function. Then once psychology begins working this out I think it should ultimately be able to reduce our various moral inclinations to standard psychological concepts.
It’s possible that existing as most anything in the universe is perfectly valueless to it, that is except for certain specific parameters of electromagnetic field. It could be that this is the physics of value. Then brains started producing such fields as fuel from which to drive the conscious form of function. If this were empirically determined in science well enough for general acceptance, do you think science would then figure out why such physics works this way, or why value thus emerges from non-value? I don’t. As a naturalist however I do presume a causal answer exists even given expected human ignorance. Regardless I suspect science will empirically determine that consciousness and thus value exist as a neurally produced electromagnetic field.
I agree with Matti that Hume’s guillotine fooled lots of people. I should have known this all along even without the fancy arguments he’s now presented. If is is all there is, and moral oughts do exist, then they must inherently come from what is. But even though Matti is a good friend, no he isn’t cheering my project on. He remains undecided about what ethics emerge from. Also I doubt he’d ever want psychologists to try to reduce our various moral notions back to psychological ideas. While I’d love to help academia fix the massive problems that I consider it to have, he seems mainly interested in personal growth.
You keep going over your usual talking points, but I'm still not seeing any solution to the problem Hume identified here. I see opinions, particularly opinions about the is-ought problem, and those who take it into account, but not a solution to it, or a logical refutation of it.
I've long thought Hume was dead wrong on causality, so it's easy for me to see he's dead wrong here. I've been sympathetic to your thesis from the beginning.
I like your notion of framing ethics as a science of the facts of human existence, especially as reflected in our language. Our language is such a deep rabbit hole. I think at least a weak form of Whorf-Sapir is likely true. Language enables thought, so our vocabulary is key on several levels.
Here's a question your posts raised for me: An alien species, or even a long-isolated human group, would evolve their own normative language and social fabric. Is there an absolute moral "attractor" in the space of all possible normative social fabrics, or is the evolved result entirely arbitrary?
My interest is in whether there are Platonic ideals for morality (Plato's Good) akin to the ideal math forms we find. If so, radically different social groups, even alien ones, should converge on these. What seems common to both our views here is the role intelligence plays. There clearly is no morality in the physics of reality — Hume's brute facts. Nor is it in the plant kingdom and most would agree nor in the animal kingdom. Save for humanity. It seems intelligence confers upon us some notion of The Good, and I'm curious just how absolute that might be. Is intelligence itself the seed from which morality springs?
That could have interesting implications for true AGI.
Wyrd, I don’t think I know enough to comment specifically on the Whorf-Sapir language hypothesis. It certainly seems to overlap a bit with the work done by Searle and others on social ontology. So, yes, in my view language clearly has an influence on culture. I agree with Searle and Kovesi that language structures and creates our social world, our civilization. But does a language constrain and limit a user’s thought itself? I’ll table that issue for now. Obviously much of my argument regarding Hume (and his confused muddle) springs from the insights developed by the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy. Searle’s work especially in speech acts and social ontology is, I submit, ground-breaking.
Your question concerning an intelligent alien species, or isolated human groups, both of which would have an evolved language with, of course, normative concepts and their own social ontology is intriguing. Can we further tap our way toward something like Platonic forms or some similar ground floor idea of the Good that all have access to? Getting to that point seems like too big a leap for my little brain at this point. However, in the heyday of anthropology in the early 20th century, researchers set off to study isolated human groups in part to discover similar truths—i.e., are ethical concepts relative? I’m thinking of Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture and Margaret Mead’s coming of Age in Samoa. Then there was Richard Brandt, a philosopher, who actually did field work among the Hopi Indians in the American Southwest. I admit I have only read secondary accounts of their work. Benedict and Mead set out purposely to prove cultural (moral) relativism. Later criticism of their work, however, reveals more about their own bias than an objective account of other cultures. I guess this is my long way around to say such investigations are at best mixed. My own layman’s interpretation is that the basics of morality seem to be cross-cultural. For example, one finds the so-called Golden Rule among virtually all cultures. Plato would have approved. So, for now, all I’ll say is that your question deserves much more thought. Thanks, that’s just the kind of challenge that brought me to this forum!
Definitely a challenge and not one I have any answers for, just guesses. I do think it would be interesting if the Platonic realm of mathematical truths that we seem to discover (rather than invent) had truths beyond math. What strikes me is that it requires intellect to discover these Platonic truths, and it also seems it requires intellect to ponder and seek morality. It does make me wonder.
Don't know if you were around last spring, but I took a stab at the Platonic realm with regard to math. I meant it as a lead-in to what I just said about the moral Good there but haven't gotten back to the topic, yet. FWIW:
As I understand it, there are strong and weak forms of Whorf-Sapir. The latter is more aligned with Searle and many others in suggesting language has an influence on what we can think about. The importance of vocabulary and grammar seem more important with technical material than casual conversation, but it's hard to talk about, say, metallurgy without a vocabulary linked to the relevant concepts and details. It seems reasonable that some form of the weak hypothesis is true.
The strong form asserts, for instance, that the First Americans would not have seen Columbus' ships because they had no language for them. Some go so far as to assert the ships would have been invisible to them. I find that hard to credit. They may have lacked the words and concepts behind the words, but I can't believe they wouldn't have seen the ships.
I was ill last Spring so I missed your post and much of everything else happening back then. Anyway your post about the Platonic realm is excellent! Thanks for sending it. As an undergrad many years ago I dismissed Plato’s “idea of the Good” out of hand. As an old guy now I realize I know next to nothing. And I do agree that the “strong” version of Whorf-Sapir is difficult to swallow. Frankly, I’m still wondering about the world of social ontology created by language. I need to spend more time pondering that.
Matti, Substack threads don’t keep going on forever. They cut them off at some point. I rescued this comment that you sent me from my email.
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October 27, 2025
Matti Meikäläinen replied to your comment on David Hume’s Muddle Part III.
I had hoped that my attempt to summarize some of the major refutations of David Hume’s confused and meaningless standard that values cannot be derived from factual descriptions would, as a minimum, elicit a curious reassessment of this old and tired ethical dogma. Boy, it’s harder than I thought. I made reference to “belief perseverance” but I had no idea of its psychological strength. My argument was in six of progressive posts—starting with A. J. Ayer at the very bottom of ethical thought, emotivism—the idea that ethics is nonsense. I then tried to point out how modern thought (i.e., the Enlightenment) created an epistemological bias that channeled our thinking (with help from Hume) into that box canyon of skepticism and relativism. After a brief discussion of values in science and how science could be a reasonable model for ethical thinking, I directly confronted Hume in three separate posts. I feel disappointed. I did not expect an epiphany. But what surprised me is that no one—no one—articulated a serious rebuttal argument against even one of the many arguments against Hume. Or, to quote Mike, [unless] I’m missing something. It’s was like, “yeah, we hear you but we still don’t buy it.” I had hoped to move on and get into a discussion of much more difficult ethical and political topics. But I think I have to reassess how I can do what I want to do this better. Hume’s dogma is like gum on my shoe that I can’t seem to scrape off. Back to the drawing board!
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As far as I’m concerned however, I’m actually agreeing with you. But I do so at a deeper level than you’re comfortable with. I believe that the field of psychology needs to get its house in order to then reduce our various moral inclinations to base psychological components. You can go back to the drawing board, but unless you dig down to this level of depth, my perspective will remain untouched. Or if you don’t want to go quite that deep, you might at least write up something that tells us your stance on moral realism versus moral antirealism. Or indeed, given the stance that you’ve taken so far (that I agree with though perhaps others do not), you could directly get into those more difficult ethical and political topics that you were hoping to. Here you’d essentially be laying your cards on the table for us to assess your hand.
Eric my friend. I deleted that note! After I wrote it I concluded that I was being a cry-baby and in spite of my hard work in trying to refute Hume’s guillotine, I cannot make anyone accept my arguments. I think Wyrd was predisposed and you seem to be more open minded. Using good philosophical arguments is not magic! Plus people have, as I’ve said, belief perseverance. When Marx’s revolution did not spontaneously take place with a proletarian uprising, Lenin re-wrote the script and came up with the need for a “vanguard” to bring it about. There are lots of other examples. I just finished a little dialogue on Substack with a philosophy professor about Rawls. He won’t fully accept my summary of various critiques even though Rawls himself took 20 years to re-think and re-write his basic theory because of the heavy criticisms. I will soldier on! And, by the way, I know we are not that far apart. I wonder if you have ever read Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy”? She wrote this in 1958 and one of the basic arguments is that we do not have an adequate philosophy of psychology to do ethics properly. If you are unaware of her work, she may help you articulate what you want to say. She was Wittgenstein’s protégé and translated and published his final work after his death. I warn you—she is a tough read! Thanks for your concern.
I see the is-ought problem as best described as just that, a problem, one that Hume identified.
But Matti, I think my question here is, do the insights you've found studying Putnam and the others now allow you to logically justify a value only from empirical data? If so a demonstration of that, or a citation of a successful attempt, seems like it would be very interesting.
Mike, I thought I replied to this in my thread. I’ll never understand Substack. Anyway, I repeat my response: Thanks for reading this. And it appears that you read all three parts. That is a very good question Mike. I really mean that. It’s a concern I’m sure many who read these posts share. That is, as you ask, can we “justify a value only from empirical data?” The same question or challenge you presented in your very first comment to Part I—“to convincingly demonstrate a value derived from a valueless fact.”
I wish I could give you a glib and convincing answer. I’m afraid my response will be unsatisfactory. As I said determining the source or sources of moral value itself is important. However, that is a separate task. My focus was that Hume’s guillotine is not the one-size-fits-all trump card that so many think it is. It had to be confronted for the confused muddle that it is. But that does not mean that I nor any of the philosophers I quoted—Putnam, Searle, Kovesi—or the many others who have mounted trenchant refutations of Hume like, for example, MacIntyre, Midgley, and Foot, are prepared to adopt his muddled linguistic framework and pull a rabbit out of that confused hat. That’s never going to happen. In short, this argument is not a set up for doing so. It’s simply a rejection of the whole set up. It’s useless. It has to be put aside.
I point to the argument of Part II. Let me add that in his breakthrough work, Beyond Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that in our practical everyday life we commonly agree on the “good” in actions and roles—a good carpenter, a good quarterback, a good father, etc. This parallels Searle’s “status function” or theory-laden factual descriptions. It also reminds us of Kovesi’s argument that “evaluation” is simply a function of “description.” Sure, there are debates around the margins but our language functions normatively unlike Hume’s insistence on a reality of only brute empirical facts. That is, our language includes normative standards. And, most importantly, that is part of our reality every bit as much as a piece of colored paper is also money! Again, there was no intention to get into the source or sources of moral standards. It’s just a rebuttal to Hume. I hope to tackle that other hard task at a later date.
In the very beginning I spoke about the psychological principle of belief perseverance. Without doubt Hume’s confused theory of facts and factual descriptions along with his strict dichotomy definitely has strong belief perseverance. It’s a lot like a sacred ritual (I called it a sideshow) and it has nothing to do with the proper study of ethics. I will say that challenging one’s understanding on this is, for many people, asking a lot. But Hume is dead wrong and this was a (too short) summary of some of the basic arguments why his rule is a useless confused muddle.
Thanks for your detailed thoughts Matti. My issue is I'm not seeing a refutation of Hume here, at least not the problem he identified. (I have to admit I didn't parse Part II as well as I should have. Maybe I missed something there.)
A lot of it seems more aimed at challenging his use of the word "fact." Fair enough. But then revising that term and saying he was wrong about the relation of values to the revised version of "fact" doesn't seem to be getting at the problem he actually identified, that we can't use the gold standard of scientific evidence, empirical observation, to justify a value. To the arguments the philosophers you quoted made, maybe we can make use of some theory development practices, but without the empirical check, that still seems more philosophy than science.
As always, I appreciate people trying to find a solution to this. Maybe there is one. But if so, I haven't seen it yet. It seems like a lot of opinions all around the issue without focusing on the core problem. But maybe I'm missing something?
Well, I did predict that you two were going to be tough nuts to crack! You certainly do not disappoint! Thanks for the constant challenge. I’ll need another cup of coffee to tackle Eric’s recent opus though! ;-)
Mike, I genuinely appreciate your honest approach to this. For me it took years of reading and thinking. It’s not easy. I remember when I drove a vehicle for the first time in the UK; I very often got into deep trouble. Those right turns nearly did me in. The mind likes to follow comfortable patterns. They seem so true. I should point out that insights gained from Wittgenstein, especially the further development of that important linguistic turn in philosophy by J. L. Austin and his students were a big help for me. I quoted two of Austin’s students, Searle and Kovesi. I was also deeply influenced by those ground-breaking women permitted to attend Oxford during the war years—Anscombe, Midgley, Foot and Murdock. They courageously fought the legions of A. J. Ayer inspired positivists and, in my opinion, deserve the lion’s share of credit in reviving Virtue Ethics. Mike, I savor our chats. Thanks for hanging in there.
I like the way you’re thinking there Mike! But then that’s more a project of mine than Matti’s. Since childhood my theory has been that value exists as feeling good rather than bad. As an adult I worked this out much further. Just as the computers that we build are energy driven, the brains that evolved are energy driven too. Consciousness however resides effectively as a value driven second form of computer that our brains evolved to implement. I’m at least beginning to become satisfied with my electromagnetic consciousness/value post where I lay this out quite simply, as well as propose how this could be confirmed or denied empirically. It’s strange how things have worked out. While I began by thinking Matti was trying to lead us into becoming moral realists, it turns out that by discrediting Hume’s “is-ought” muddle he was actually setting the table for me!
Eric,
I'll ask you the same question. You seem to be basing your utilitarianism (which as I recall you don't like calling utilitarianism) on good feelings. Fair enough. But how would you logically justify good feelings as a value using no other values, just empirical data?
What I don’t like about utilitarianism is that it’s explicitly a moral theory, or about a judged rightness to wrongness of behavior. That gets into all sorts of social matters — the norms of behavior and whatnot. More basic that morality is the concept of value itself, or the goodness to badness of existing. My sense is that the field of philosophy has essentially ignored this more basic idea thus leaving the higher concept of morality to remain inherently speculative or “philosophical”.
To me that sets things up for your question. As I see it people in academia have only worried about the concept of values (plural). What I’m talking about is the beginning concept of value in itself by which the rest emerge. I’m talking about the physics of value. And how does non value physics create value physics? I don’t mind calling this “a hard problem” that I don’t expect humanity to ever truly make sense of. But as a naturalist I presume systemic causality does answer this question in the end. If my EMF testing proposal bears this theory out then I think things should become more plain. I think people would eventually say “So value resides by means of this sort of physics, not that we grasp exactly why”. Then from my perspective ideally the field of psychology would become founded upon value just as economics already is and so begin developing effective general models of our nature. I think it would eventually even reduce our various moral notions to theory of mind sensations like “envy” and the care sensitivity we feel for others. That’s probably ambitious for now though.
So moral values don't exist? And value in general is a "hard problem"? It seems like the only difference you have with Hume is you think there is a fact of the matter (for non-moral values), but you don't expect us to ever be able to justify it. If so, I'm not sure you're necessarily in Matti's camp here.
In any case, it seems like the gap Hume identified still exists for you. Or at least I don't see a solution to it here. Unless I'm missing it?
I certainly didn’t say that moral values don’t exist Mike. I said there’s something more fundamental that they emerge from. This would be value in itself, or the goodness to badness of existing as anything. Without this there’d be no morality. Conversely morality needn’t exist just because value exists. And what constitutes the value of existing for anything? I believe it’s how good to bad something feels from moment to moment. Theoretically this is the fuel which drives the conscious form of function. Then once psychology begins working this out I think it should ultimately be able to reduce our various moral inclinations to standard psychological concepts.
It’s possible that existing as most anything in the universe is perfectly valueless to it, that is except for certain specific parameters of electromagnetic field. It could be that this is the physics of value. Then brains started producing such fields as fuel from which to drive the conscious form of function. If this were empirically determined in science well enough for general acceptance, do you think science would then figure out why such physics works this way, or why value thus emerges from non-value? I don’t. As a naturalist however I do presume a causal answer exists even given expected human ignorance. Regardless I suspect science will empirically determine that consciousness and thus value exist as a neurally produced electromagnetic field.
I agree with Matti that Hume’s guillotine fooled lots of people. I should have known this all along even without the fancy arguments he’s now presented. If is is all there is, and moral oughts do exist, then they must inherently come from what is. But even though Matti is a good friend, no he isn’t cheering my project on. He remains undecided about what ethics emerge from. Also I doubt he’d ever want psychologists to try to reduce our various moral notions back to psychological ideas. While I’d love to help academia fix the massive problems that I consider it to have, he seems mainly interested in personal growth.
Eric,
You keep going over your usual talking points, but I'm still not seeing any solution to the problem Hume identified here. I see opinions, particularly opinions about the is-ought problem, and those who take it into account, but not a solution to it, or a logical refutation of it.
I've long thought Hume was dead wrong on causality, so it's easy for me to see he's dead wrong here. I've been sympathetic to your thesis from the beginning.
I like your notion of framing ethics as a science of the facts of human existence, especially as reflected in our language. Our language is such a deep rabbit hole. I think at least a weak form of Whorf-Sapir is likely true. Language enables thought, so our vocabulary is key on several levels.
Here's a question your posts raised for me: An alien species, or even a long-isolated human group, would evolve their own normative language and social fabric. Is there an absolute moral "attractor" in the space of all possible normative social fabrics, or is the evolved result entirely arbitrary?
My interest is in whether there are Platonic ideals for morality (Plato's Good) akin to the ideal math forms we find. If so, radically different social groups, even alien ones, should converge on these. What seems common to both our views here is the role intelligence plays. There clearly is no morality in the physics of reality — Hume's brute facts. Nor is it in the plant kingdom and most would agree nor in the animal kingdom. Save for humanity. It seems intelligence confers upon us some notion of The Good, and I'm curious just how absolute that might be. Is intelligence itself the seed from which morality springs?
That could have interesting implications for true AGI.
I need to reply to your meaty questions. But they deserve careful consideration.
I'm retired; take your time! 😉
Wyrd, I don’t think I know enough to comment specifically on the Whorf-Sapir language hypothesis. It certainly seems to overlap a bit with the work done by Searle and others on social ontology. So, yes, in my view language clearly has an influence on culture. I agree with Searle and Kovesi that language structures and creates our social world, our civilization. But does a language constrain and limit a user’s thought itself? I’ll table that issue for now. Obviously much of my argument regarding Hume (and his confused muddle) springs from the insights developed by the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy. Searle’s work especially in speech acts and social ontology is, I submit, ground-breaking.
Your question concerning an intelligent alien species, or isolated human groups, both of which would have an evolved language with, of course, normative concepts and their own social ontology is intriguing. Can we further tap our way toward something like Platonic forms or some similar ground floor idea of the Good that all have access to? Getting to that point seems like too big a leap for my little brain at this point. However, in the heyday of anthropology in the early 20th century, researchers set off to study isolated human groups in part to discover similar truths—i.e., are ethical concepts relative? I’m thinking of Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture and Margaret Mead’s coming of Age in Samoa. Then there was Richard Brandt, a philosopher, who actually did field work among the Hopi Indians in the American Southwest. I admit I have only read secondary accounts of their work. Benedict and Mead set out purposely to prove cultural (moral) relativism. Later criticism of their work, however, reveals more about their own bias than an objective account of other cultures. I guess this is my long way around to say such investigations are at best mixed. My own layman’s interpretation is that the basics of morality seem to be cross-cultural. For example, one finds the so-called Golden Rule among virtually all cultures. Plato would have approved. So, for now, all I’ll say is that your question deserves much more thought. Thanks, that’s just the kind of challenge that brought me to this forum!
Definitely a challenge and not one I have any answers for, just guesses. I do think it would be interesting if the Platonic realm of mathematical truths that we seem to discover (rather than invent) had truths beyond math. What strikes me is that it requires intellect to discover these Platonic truths, and it also seems it requires intellect to ponder and seek morality. It does make me wonder.
Don't know if you were around last spring, but I took a stab at the Platonic realm with regard to math. I meant it as a lead-in to what I just said about the moral Good there but haven't gotten back to the topic, yet. FWIW:
https://logosconcarne.substack.com/p/where-is-the-platonic-realm
As I understand it, there are strong and weak forms of Whorf-Sapir. The latter is more aligned with Searle and many others in suggesting language has an influence on what we can think about. The importance of vocabulary and grammar seem more important with technical material than casual conversation, but it's hard to talk about, say, metallurgy without a vocabulary linked to the relevant concepts and details. It seems reasonable that some form of the weak hypothesis is true.
The strong form asserts, for instance, that the First Americans would not have seen Columbus' ships because they had no language for them. Some go so far as to assert the ships would have been invisible to them. I find that hard to credit. They may have lacked the words and concepts behind the words, but I can't believe they wouldn't have seen the ships.
I was ill last Spring so I missed your post and much of everything else happening back then. Anyway your post about the Platonic realm is excellent! Thanks for sending it. As an undergrad many years ago I dismissed Plato’s “idea of the Good” out of hand. As an old guy now I realize I know next to nothing. And I do agree that the “strong” version of Whorf-Sapir is difficult to swallow. Frankly, I’m still wondering about the world of social ontology created by language. I need to spend more time pondering that.
Matti, Substack threads don’t keep going on forever. They cut them off at some point. I rescued this comment that you sent me from my email.
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October 27, 2025
Matti Meikäläinen replied to your comment on David Hume’s Muddle Part III.
I had hoped that my attempt to summarize some of the major refutations of David Hume’s confused and meaningless standard that values cannot be derived from factual descriptions would, as a minimum, elicit a curious reassessment of this old and tired ethical dogma. Boy, it’s harder than I thought. I made reference to “belief perseverance” but I had no idea of its psychological strength. My argument was in six of progressive posts—starting with A. J. Ayer at the very bottom of ethical thought, emotivism—the idea that ethics is nonsense. I then tried to point out how modern thought (i.e., the Enlightenment) created an epistemological bias that channeled our thinking (with help from Hume) into that box canyon of skepticism and relativism. After a brief discussion of values in science and how science could be a reasonable model for ethical thinking, I directly confronted Hume in three separate posts. I feel disappointed. I did not expect an epiphany. But what surprised me is that no one—no one—articulated a serious rebuttal argument against even one of the many arguments against Hume. Or, to quote Mike, [unless] I’m missing something. It’s was like, “yeah, we hear you but we still don’t buy it.” I had hoped to move on and get into a discussion of much more difficult ethical and political topics. But I think I have to reassess how I can do what I want to do this better. Hume’s dogma is like gum on my shoe that I can’t seem to scrape off. Back to the drawing board!
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As far as I’m concerned however, I’m actually agreeing with you. But I do so at a deeper level than you’re comfortable with. I believe that the field of psychology needs to get its house in order to then reduce our various moral inclinations to base psychological components. You can go back to the drawing board, but unless you dig down to this level of depth, my perspective will remain untouched. Or if you don’t want to go quite that deep, you might at least write up something that tells us your stance on moral realism versus moral antirealism. Or indeed, given the stance that you’ve taken so far (that I agree with though perhaps others do not), you could directly get into those more difficult ethical and political topics that you were hoping to. Here you’d essentially be laying your cards on the table for us to assess your hand.
Eric my friend. I deleted that note! After I wrote it I concluded that I was being a cry-baby and in spite of my hard work in trying to refute Hume’s guillotine, I cannot make anyone accept my arguments. I think Wyrd was predisposed and you seem to be more open minded. Using good philosophical arguments is not magic! Plus people have, as I’ve said, belief perseverance. When Marx’s revolution did not spontaneously take place with a proletarian uprising, Lenin re-wrote the script and came up with the need for a “vanguard” to bring it about. There are lots of other examples. I just finished a little dialogue on Substack with a philosophy professor about Rawls. He won’t fully accept my summary of various critiques even though Rawls himself took 20 years to re-think and re-write his basic theory because of the heavy criticisms. I will soldier on! And, by the way, I know we are not that far apart. I wonder if you have ever read Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy”? She wrote this in 1958 and one of the basic arguments is that we do not have an adequate philosophy of psychology to do ethics properly. If you are unaware of her work, she may help you articulate what you want to say. She was Wittgenstein’s protégé and translated and published his final work after his death. I warn you—she is a tough read! Thanks for your concern.
Okay good, sounds like you’re having fun! At the moment I’m getting that EMF consciousness post ready for publication, so I’m having fun too!