"I'm not even onboard with the notion that violence is necessary and therefore acceptable"

Looks like I lost you before the first affirmation, even if you read the whole thing. Especially about the part where you live in exactly such a society, and where you do authorize such violence as a last resort.

"God is Love, Love is blind, therefore God is Blind"

Yes, and?

That would fall under Category 3 or 4 above, and therefore outside the scope of the article.

(It was not as long as I really needed to elucidate the finer points, but then I was already over the recommended limit by a several hundred words. Hey, I am not accomplished enough a writer to make it shorter. Even when I cheated a bit by using hyper-links for details)

Non, non, non, Brother Shri. Imagine this: EVERY, verifiably EVERY, American marches through the machine dialed to three, they are held in its clutches and whimper or yelp. They are held until they question that they will soon be released. Then they are soothed by large breasted earth mothers, patted on the butt to toddle on home. Both they and the government have gathered intelligence in the process. They are informed. ;-)

Is every police office required to receive a tazing before being certified in its use on others? Or did I imagine it?

Brother Shri, you rock, it wasn't long in the least. I was just teasing John C.

I applaud your efforts and your tag "the mind is a terrible thing." Long may you run.

Ah, like how we should incarcerate EVERY, verifiably EVERY, American through a San Quentin cell for the Chronometer to read three years before "we" determine whether it is ethical to imprison heinously violent offenders for A Long Time?

I do not know about tazing, but I am pretty certain that one is not required to be shot before being certified in shooting someone else. Pretty certain I did not imagine that. Likewise, I am sure that our well trained military, forget EVERY American, was not required to subject themselves to being bombed before they bombed someone like the Nazis ostensibly for the poor excuse of freeing Jews from their ovens, or, 'our freedoms' (chuckle).

Still at 3 or 4, Brother Pan. Unless of course you ignore the specific conditions of the affirmation, and the precise premises preceding it, which I am increasingly certain that you have. Like a penguin that ignores the polar bear by virtue of inhabiting the wrong hemisphere.

'... this far but no farther', I'm afraid

I plead the kitty. Bring on the polar Bauer.

Nice of you to correct the "requirement" to a mere "strong recommendation", but it still misses one key point. Your call was to subject every American, not every "American responsible for torturing" to Dial position 3. In your tazing example, had you made a call for every American to be tazed instead of just the "cops responsible for tazing", then it'd be equivalent.

Still would be a non sequitur though, since the "being shot" counter-example exists.

Aw, you're all crabby and *. If a worthy logician don't show up soon I'm a-feared you're gonna go the full premenstrual on us. Medic!

:-)

Hey, I did say me-is-amateur.

Unlike the privileged class of The Murdoch Men at the National Fishwrapping Journal who can divine agreement divinely, I, a lowly Mission Viejoite (is that even a word?) have to rely on my feeble body and what's left of my mind.

Not too much to expect a transition from Kitty to Penguin, is it Brother Pan? I mean, here I am, curled up in the fetal position, but neurons a-blazin'

LOL! Lucky for you I am a self-ordained minister of considerable compassion:

Dear Lord
Grant Brother Shripathi Kamath a worthy cohort in his quest for specificity and rationality
Speed him toward an argument both valid and sound
Call forth those consciousnesses capable of comprehending fully the stunning symmetry
the structural integrity and load bearing strength
of a proposition tried by fire and tempered in the cooling waters of accession
In Jesus name, though he may not believe in you or any of that other crap, Amen.

Dan-O, in this case it may have something to do with "envelopment." A living, fleshy poultice to the newly informed.

But that might not be everyone's cup of teat, I concede.

Perhaps a panel of three EM's could present themselves to the victim, each with outstretched arms. Like the touch hungry monkey starved by the cold wire mother, he would rush instinctively to the torso most felt-like to him.

Kitty tangled in a ball of yarn. Out.

"God is love, love is blind, therefore Ray Charles is God. Oh wait that isn't logically valid."

Correct. That would a classic illustration of a logical fallacy. In sharp contrast to the early deduction you posited,
"God is Love, Love is blind, therefore God is Blind", which is a logically valid argument. For it to be logically sound, the premises have to shown as true.

Exactly SK but you had asked "And?" of the valid one so I just dangled the silly one to make you admit it was both sound and valid, just like your argument.

We have two sound, logical valid arguments; both of them are utter nonsense. Hence the appropriateness of my reference to Swift. His essay also being nonsense; beautifully written, and a perfect example of irony at it's finest, but nonsense nonetheless.

One cannot apply sound, valid logic in a truly meaningful way to either man or God. That is precisely why we invented poetry.

"a man said to the universe,
'Sir, I exist.'
'However,' replied the Universe,
'that fact does not create in me
a sense of obligation.'" Stephen Crane, from "Do Not Weep Poor Maidian For War Is Kind"

Er, no. I point out that your second one is silly because it violates logic. They are not equivalent. Yours is flawed in logic. Mine maybe, but you haven't show that. You simply detest the conclusion of mine. I'll show why yours is wrong, if you do the same for mine.

Your first one is a logically valid argument. It has not been shown to be logically sound. Those phrases have specific meanings in philosophy (and hence the hyper-link references in the article)

The "And?" refers to "You have successfully argued that God is blind, so what ethical affirmation are we to draw from that conclusion?"

If none, then what was the point? Showing another argument to be valid (or invalid) has no bearing on mine unless you show why it should apply. Hence the "And?"

As I said, I am a bit unsure of my argument being logically sound, but I do claim that it is at least logically valid. I do not mind disagreements as long as they are directed at the argument to reach the conclusion.

contd...

contd...

I have laid out the premises, the definitions, and the deduction to the conclusion. I get it that you don't like the conclusion (neither do I, BTW), so to dismiss it, you can declare by fiat that it is wrong, and join the venerable sages of our generation like Bill O'Reilly on most things, or a garden variety pastor behind a bully pulpit on homosexuality.

Perhaps at this very hour.

Or you can reconsider, and discuss or dismiss one or more of the premises, and set us both at ease that the conclusion is (whew!) logically untenable!

C'mon it could be fun. It could serve as a good example (I hope) of discussing the matter rationally, debating what was said and not what we like or not like. We can do that anytime.

You think it is easy making a case for torture to be ethical, logically? Dispassionately?

I think it should be easier than making one to go to war.

That's all well and good but my point was that one can't apply logic in a meaningful way to either man or God and that is why we invented poetry. Hence the verse by Stephen Crane. I mean logic is nothing more than being clever with words, like poetry, and it needn't even contain "truth," again like poetry. So it's not really any different than poetry, except that it's a lower form of rhetoric, because it's based in abstractions that have so many different meanings they are truly meaningless no matter how one defines them, it's a lot easier to write than a poem because it lacks complexity, depth and precision, and it lacks Art.

And by that I mean that when you begin to use concrete images, a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater, say, you can no longer control all the associations a reader will come to find there. Therefore, the text really ceases to exist until the next reader comes along and creates it by giving it meaning. It is in that sense a writer may approach saying something meaningful as far as man and God go, but only because the writer removed herself and the importance of herself from the notion of a poem. If the writer has a "message" that must be heard, and understood the way the writer intended it, then the "writer" (so-called) is nothing more than an egotistical fascist.

"one can't apply logic in a meaningful way to either man or God"

I'll agree with half of that.

"If the writer has a "message" that must be heard, and understood the way the writer intended it, then the "writer" (so-called) is nothing more than an egotistical fascist."

Guilty as charged, I suppose. I am no poet, nor pretend or aspire to be one. I also do not have a message that *must* be heard, only a perspective to be discussed, so you'll forgive me if I tried to make it clear what seemed obscure or was obscured to some readers.

Thanks Roy, that was indeed kind.

"It remains possible that there exist methods, that do not entail torture, that could also have acquired the information. To the extent that that possibility exists, the use of torture is not justified."

The point being that if you can obtain the information by means that do not involve torture, the use of torture is not justified. I agree. My argument commences after that. When *all* other means have been explored.

My citing McCain is not to describe the relative effectiveness of torture over other means in all situations but to cite that torture is *a* means of extracting information, even if in McCain's case it is rather evident that it was the most effective.

My concern with the statement "torture works" is that I think it is false.

Torture only works indirectly, or with preexisting knowledge of the information sought, and it is an ineffective method which never occurs in a vacuum. It doesn't just hurt the recipient, but their associates and loved ones as well as the person (or nation) doing the torturing. It is a matter of the calculus of economics, where the X-axis meets the Y-axis. The torturer must escalate to force the torturee to cross that point. If the tortured person's belief in what they value is very high that point may never be reached; what then, murder? Release? Hold indefinitely?

Detention for torture has a very high cost and a very low yield in quality and quantity (economically unsound)

Un-mentioned is the elephant in the room: The Bush-Cheney propaganda that torture is necessary and effective; perpetration of the torture (ethical or otherwise); as well as the glaring lack of political will to demand that it end immediately.

OK, and this is not the forum for it, but would the correct form for presenting it require the notational representation of logic?

1. "OK, and this is not the forum for it, but would the correct form for presenting it require the notational representation of logic?"
--I'm not sure what you're asking, but I think I get it. In my field (philosophy), we proceed as follows: we isolate the premises and the conclusion of an argument (including any tacit premises). We seek to be true to the author's intent (evidently, in some fields, this is called a fallacy; not in logic or philosophy). Further, if there is a deficiency in the reasoning that can be corrected, we make the correction (the principle of charity). Any argument--any piece of reasoning--can be expressed in a series of propositions. It is an important goal of logic to provide a "language" (the notation to which you refer, I guess) that will allow translation of any reasoner's meaning into a logical language (sometimes called "official standard form," etc.) that is truth functional--i.e., that has clear truth conditions.
Thus, for instance, if an arguer asserts that, "If you know something, then you believe something," there is a logical language that includes a handful of connectives, including the horseshoe: ⊃ The horseshoe connector is defined as follows: (continued)

2. (Def. of "A ⊃ B")
A ⊃ B (is true) just in case either
A is true and B is true
A is false and B is true
A is false and B is false

A ⊃ B is false only if
A is true and B is false

Now, if the author's meaning in saying "If you know something, then you believe something" is well captured with this connective, then we can express it as
A ⊃ B
--where A is "You know something" and B is "You believe something."
Once you have all of your premises and your conclusion properly "translated" (without loss of meaning), then we end up with something that may look like one of these:

A ⊃ B
~B
∴ ~A

or

A ⊃ B
A
∴ B

or

A ⊃ B
B
∴ A

--and so on. (continued)

3. (continued)
Because these new expressions (in our logical language) have the advantage of having clearly defined truth conditions, we can now determine whether these arguments are valid or invalid -- i.e., we can determine whether they are "truth preserving" in a rigorous manner.

Once we have your reasoning pared down to a series of propositions, we can perform this sort of "translation" of your premises and conclusion into a logical language that is truth-functional. We can then rigorously determine whether the argument is valid.

If the argument is determined to be valid, we must then ask if its premises are true (the last requirement for a deductive argument). In Philosophy (as in the natural sciences), few take the skeptical view that the truth or falsity of sentences can never be determined with some degree of confidence. And so we proceed with caution, seeking to determine the truth of the premises (perhaps only with a degree of probability). (It appears that in some fields this is anathema.)

That was made by someone else, but I did endorse.

To me, the validity stemmed from a simple IF A THEN B, IF B THEN C. A. Therefore C.

The vagueness or the ambiguity is retained through both, isn't it?

(A no would suffice, and I'll dig deeper. I do not mean for you to educate me for free, in a blog, even though I'd appreciate it)

Thanks, that seems like good advice.

Dan, Roy's point seems to be that a, b, and c as defined are vague or ambiguous in definition. I have the same question.

1. God is love
2. Love is blind
3. Thus God is blind

You are assuming that “is” in the two premises is the “is” of identity, as when one says that Superman is Clark Kent. One might make a case for that in the first premise (though I would dispute it), but one cannot make a case for the second. “Love is blind” clearly is not suggesting that “love” is identical with blindness. Rather, blindness is a characteristic attributed to love, as it is attributed to RC in “Ray Charles is blind.”

On the other hand, if the 1st premise is saying that God and Love are one and the same, then, despite the 2nd premise being the attribution of a characteristic to something (not an equivalency statement), the argument would appear to be valid.

But I’m not convinced that those who assert that God is love intend an equivalency. It seems to me that they mean that God is many things and among these (and, perhaps most importantly), He is love.

If I say that energy is visible light, I do not mean that visible light and energy are one and the same; rather, I mean that the phenomenon of visible light is one manifestation of energy. Energy is also infrared radiation, etc.

I do not assume that I know what a speaker meant--it rather depends on the case. Sometimes, yes, I do believe I know what a speaker meant. I would be amazed were you to deny that you ever have confidence that you know what a speaker meant. Really? If your wife says, "I think you're being rude," you don't know what she means? You must have an interesting marriage (if you're married).
In any case, I do believe that the meaning of an utterance is tied to what the speaker means. Evidently, you do not.
I see that you are appealing to "deconstruction" theory. That is your right, of course. But please be aware that many people in my field (philosophy--i.e., what goes on in philosophy departments, not literary departments) reject (or worse than reject) deconstruction theory. I do realize that many denizens of English and lit departments imagine themselves to be philosophers, and since they read the "deconstructionists," deconstruction must be pretty important to them. No doubt it is. But among philosophers in this country (not people in literary departments), "deconstruction" and the likes is pretty fringy and generally not highly regarded. I don't mean this as a put down. I just want you to understand how I, trained in American academic philosophy, am receiving your appeal to deconstruction theory.
You say "'God is love' is a simple declarative sentence that equates the two." Really? And you will not respect an opinion to the contrary? Gosh. OK then.