The conclusion "Love is good" actually has a very different meaning for the person making the argument.

It can have a different meaning, depending on what a person means by the term "love." I thought I made that distinction in Part 1 of the article.

When dealing with concepts, we know we can always go look at the referents of the concepts. If we did the same with the proposition, we would notice that the arguer would use radically different referents than we would. They would look at a sacrificial love and say it's an example of love being good. We would disagree. And thus we would argue that their final statement is actually false (as well as their argument being false).

Forget what you think Schwartz means by love. Can you see what I'm getting at? If just the statement "Love is good" has radically different referents, doesn't it mean that one view is false?

If we take that to be the thrust of Schwartz's argument, it makes sense (although we'd still have to decide if it's universally applicable).

We could say that by understanding the argument made, we can see how their final statement means something entirely different from it's face value. We might then make the more aggressive statement that if they actually derived the conclusion from false statements, the end result at least partially contains those false premises, and so is false.

But we can take it step by step. You say:

Observe that there is a difference between the proposition, "(Selfish) love is good" and the proposition "(Selfish) love is good, because...." The first proposition is true, while the second could be false.

Let's look at this in more detail. If someone said "love is good", would you dare to tell them that you completely agree? I certainly wouldn't.

Love certainly can be good, but the context would matter a lot, wouldn't it?

If they made a blanket statement like that, we'd have to rule it as false.

So at least in this case, the statement "love is good" needs to be limited and applicable in certain contexts.

By looking at the person's argument that makes this conclusion, we can see that their choosing a context and scope that make it false. Once again, the meaning of the conclusion needs to be understood before it can be evaluated. And by seeing the false arguments, we understand enough of the meaning of the conclusion to dismiss it.

But in this quote, you used the term 'selfish'. So let's assume that for now (although I'm not convinced) that the conclusion means that.

You argue the first statement is true, but the second may not be.

Is the first one true? Objectivism doesn't have a theory of propositions, but I think if it is anything like how we treat concepts, we can look at what are the referents of the statement. It's making a statement about reality, in this case a generalized statement, and we can look at the specific examples. So as I said before, I think we can argue that the first statement is factually wrong. And in fact, we can know that it's wrong because they came to the conclusion in a way that makes them choose incorrect referents.

So while the statement "(selfish) love is good" might be able to refer to a statement about reality that we would agree with, this example highlights the need for understanding the context and meaning of the proposition. It just means that a statement like that can have more than one meaning, and to judge it, we need to know what the meaning is.

And this explains why I'm hesitant to discard the "because" part of the statement. Saying "love is good" connects these two concepts, but without understanding what kind of connection is meant, we can't judge the validity of it.

You mean that we can't judge the truth of it, not the validity. "Validity" refers to the conclusion's derivation from the premises, not to its correspondence with reality.

We can't figure out what the referents are. We can see that it's a statement, but we don't really know what it means.

You say:

It is very important not to confuse an argument with its conclusion. What you're saying is a conclusion is really an argument containing a conclusion.

Actually, I thought I was saying that the conclusion contains some amount of the argument.

But I don't think I'm confusing the argument with the conclusion. I'm not trying to judge the conclusion based on whether it was properly derived from it's conclusions.

You mean from its "premises." :-) But you were equating the argument with the conclusion when you said that the conclusion is "Love is good, because...." Here you are saying that the conclusion is the conclusion plus the premises, since the "because..." clause constitutes the premises.

That would be a mistake, and I agree that we would call it "invalid" in that case.

I wouldn't say it's "invalid," just that the proposition would then include more than simply the conclusion.

But I'm not even suggesting that the argument is invalid. I'm just saying that the meaning of the conclusion, the referents which it describes, are based on the initial premises. It's not the argument that's wrong. The meaning of the conclusion is wrong.

You say:

The meaning of the conclusion depends on the meaning of its constituent terms, whose meaning is itself determined by their meaning in the premises.

This might be the major difference in our lines of thought. I don't think you can just take the constituent terms, slap them together, and say that's the meaning of the conclusion. The conclusion connects these constituent terms through a specific means. The person making the conclusion means something in particular.

Maybe this is a technical disagreement. Maybe you're saying that technically, the conclusion is only stating that there is a relationship between love and good, and doesn't at all say or mean anything about the specific kind of connection. So even though it was generated by seeing a specific connection, the conclusion actually makes a more generalized statement?

That doesn't really make sense to me. If they generated the conclusion by a specific means, it seems that the "love is good" is referring to that conclusion. Otherwise, it would be like them following the logic, coming to a conclusion supported by the logic, but then stating "We can see that there is indeed some connection between love and good, and that love must at times be good, but we make no statement about why that's the case or how exactly love is good". It's only this super generalized statements where the referents are not just abstracted, but completely dropped, that we could then say "Why yes...they came to a true conclusion through false premises!".

You then add an example of your own:

All socialists are atheists. (False)
All atheists are collectivists. (False)
Therefore, all socialists are collectivists. (True)

This one is more difficult because it's harder to understand how someone would make this argument, and thus it's harder to see what the conclusion is referring to for them. It has to be more than just statistical. They have to have reasons for supporting these premises. Maybe they think socialists are atheists because a belief in god is somehow incompatible with socialism. And maybe they think that all atheists are collectivists because a belief in god is necessary to be an individualist. So then they make their conclusion that socialists can't be religious, and so they can't be individualists. So the connection made is via their godlessness, and not through their shared anti-individualism. The conclusion centers around the belief that atheism is the connection.

Yes, "atheism" is the middle term.

Do we agree with that? No.

So again, only taking a very sterile view of their conclusion, as if they're just words and not meaning anything deeper, can we say that it's correct.

I don't know what you mean by "sterile." The conclusion means what it means, irrespective of the truth or falsity of the premises and irrespective of the validity or invalidity of the deductive process. The conclusion doesn't state the premises and it doesn't mean the premises. It means the conclusion.

But if we understand that they mean something entirely different than we do, we'd have to say that we disagree. We don't disagree with every possible meaning of the statement. We just disagree with their meaning.

So if we take the statement at face value, assuming it's not referring to any specific kind of connection, but just simply stating the existence of a connection, only then could we say that it's true.

But, and this gets into your second article discussion of the arbitrary, the statement becomes arbitrary. Only be assuming there's no reason for stating it or there's no knowledge which it's based on can we say that's it's true.

I think we're talking past each other, and it's possible the examples we're using aren't helping. You've been focusing on the referents of proposition, and showing that the statement is literally true given the proper referents. But this is missing my point, and from your description, seems to miss Schwartz's point (my opinion...again, I haven't heard his speech). So let me try to show a few different examples of the basic idea.

Let me stop you here, Joe. It does not miss Schwartz's point. I have listened to his speech, transcribed it in it's entirety, gone over it carefully, and given exact quotations. What you see is precisely what he said.

One example that was given was someone who believes that murder is wrong because God says so. Or let's put rephrase to say that he accepts whatever his religious leaders tell him. They tell him murder is wrong, so he thinks it's wrong. Now when he says "Murder is wrong", you can say that his statement corresponds to reality. And it would, if the statement were taken out of the context of his own beliefs. What he really thinks is that murder is wrong as long as his religious leaders say it is. He only accepts the statement in a limited context.

If we stick with just evaluating the proposition "Murder is wrong", then we can say it's true. But that's not a full statement of his belief. It's an abridged version of it.

When we understand the context of his belief, we may learn that there's a lot more to it. He may mean that murder is wrong, until he's told otherwise. Or maybe he thinks killing infidels doesn't count as murder. Or maybe he thinks it's a minor offense, but drawing pictures of Mohammad is far worse. Or he may mean it's only wrong on certain holidays. The fact that his final statement sounds like something we would say does not make it true. You keep focusing on whether the concepts that make up the proposition are the same as what we mean, and then judging it from our own knowledge and perspective. But he may really mean the same thing by 'murder' and 'wrong' as we do, and yet the statement clearly means something different.

We can go ahead and define them as "intentionally killing innocent people" and "something we should not do".

The context of his knowledge is important. We can't simply evaluate the statement he makes at the end. His final statement is a representation of his belief, but it only states some aspects of it. This is where the whole contextual nature of knowledge has to be evaluated.

Just look at how the context of his beliefs impacts the meaning of the statement.
1.) The degree of the wrongness of murder. Without context, we can get a sense of the degree, and whether it's appropriate.
2.) What exceptions there might be to the statement. While he may think murder is wrong, he may have different views of what constitutes murder.

3.) The context tells us under what conditions the statement is true. Do lifeboat situations change things?

For him, if his religious leader changes his mind, that changes things.

4.) To say something is wrong implies some kind of standard of value. That provides us insight into how strong of a statement it is and how each individual example compares to it.

Does the context of the statement matter?

Certainly in real life it does. I'm not interested in evaluating the merits of a statement that only partially reflects a person's understanding/belief. The question isn't whether a statement taken out of context is true or false.

What if we were to try to show that it's true that murder is wrong. We'd have to refer to a specific moral theory. We'd have to describe carefully what is murder. We'd have to connect murder to wrongness by showing exactly why it's wrong, and how wrong it is. Only within this precise context can we say the statement is true.

And yet when someone makes the statement, you want to ignore whether he upholds the same context and evaluate the statement on its own merits.

Can it be done? Should it be done? If they don't share the same context, is their meaning correct?

In the "love is good" example, we have the same problems. It can only be judged with a specific standard of value, and only under specific conditions. And yet when they reject those conditions, standard, and the rest of the context, are they really correct?

In the socialists are collectivists argument, is it true? Can someone be a socialist, upholding government ownership of all property, for other reasons (like thinking he'll be better off). He doesn't have to believe that the collective is the source or recipient of value. He just has to decide he wants it anyway. Only by narrowly defining the context can we say the statement is true. And then we'd find that the person in question doesn't share that context, because he arrived at the conclusion via some false view of atheism.

In fact, the more I look at this whole thing, the more convinced I am that Schwartz is right. "The context is the why, and it determines the what; it determines what it is that we grasp about reality as we form knowledge."

Your argument against the "Thou shalt not kill" ends with:

To be sure, if instead of 'Murder is wrong,' the conclusion were that 'Murder is wrong unless God should demand it," then that conclusion would be false, but it would be false because it does not correspond to reality, not because bad reasons happen to be given for it.

But Schwartz's point was that the bad reasons behind the conclusion made the conclusion mean "Murder is wrong unless God should demand it".

Sure, it should be judged on its own correspondence to reality. But it's the real meaning that should be judged, not some abbreviated description that ignores the context. Similarly with the "Love is good" argument. The real meaning is "(Selfish) Love is good because it's selfless!".

There's the further question of whether the "vital principle" is always true, but given the examples so far, they all support it.

The point I'm concerned with is whether false premises have the power to change the conclusion.

False reasons don't change the conclusion, because they're reasons for the conclusion.

That is, in some cases, false reasons don't lead to the same conclusion.

For those religious people who think murder is wrong, their conclusion really has a complex, contextual meaning that is false. While it may lead to the right actions most of the time, the conclusion itself is false. It's no different from saying we shouldn't kill another human being. While in most circumstances that works well in practice, there are situations where it's entirely false and destructive.

[L]et's take the pacifist. If we limited the context of applying his pacifist principle to only peaceful situations, would we say that he's correct? That we're in agreement?

We don't agree with his overall principle.

If we only judge that principle in the context where it happens to lead to positive results, aren't we assuming upfront that his principle actually is wrong overall?

I'm not trying to show what it requires for us to know something is true. I'm trying to show what context is required in order for it to be true. If a person takes the statement but without the required context for it to be true, it isn't true.

They will apply it in the wrong situations. They will have different referents than we do. If a statement requires a very specific context in order to be true, then when a person lacks that context, the statement isn't true.

Sure, [a conclusion] should be judged on its own correspondence to reality. But it's the real meaning that should be judged, not some abbreviated description that ignores the context. Similarly with the "Love is good" argument. The real meaning is "(Selfish) Love is good because it's selfless!".

No, that's not the meaning of the conclusion; you're mixing the premises in with the conclusion again. Remember, the conclusion does not include the premises. If it did, it wouldn't be a conclusion from the premises.

No. The person making that argument would conclude that the more of a sacrifice the love is, the more "good" it is. The conclusion does not stand in isolation from the premises. As Schwartz said and you seemed to agree, ""The context is the why, and it determines the what; it determines what it is that we grasp about reality as we form knowledge."

I'm not Schwartz. He might have argued all knowledge is contextual, and so his principle applies universally. I wouldn't say that. I would say that the principle applies more in propositions that need a lot of context for them to be true.

The more context needed, the more unlikely that getting at it through false premises will lead to the conclusion. In practice, it would almost never be the case. Usually faulty premises lead you to completely wrong conclusions. But even when there's a superficial appearance of correctness, often the meaning will be different precisely because the means of arriving at it were false.

The same general ideas goes for arbitrary statements. The more context needed for a statement to be true, the more difficult it is to arrive at it through arbitrary means.

If your only point is to say that if they arrive at a true conclusion through false means, it's still true because it corresponds to reality, there's no argument between us (nor, seemingly, with Schwartz).

But, you see, it is Schwartz’s point that false premises cannot yield a true conclusion.

But his insight is that the false means usually leads to a different meaning that doesn't correspond to reality.

If you want to argue with him about that always being the case, I'm fine with that too. He doesn't prove it's always the case.

But you seem to be going further by arguing against his examples and insight that the false premises actually lead to a different result.

At least in the murder example, you seem willing to admit that the conclusion, while sounding correct, is actually quite different. I hope you can see it's because the means of arriving at it are actually wrong.

Moving on. You say

If what you're saying is that the reasons for a conclusion can sometimes be a clue that the meaning of the words in the conclusion is different than one might initially have thought, then I agree.

No. That's not what I mean, although it is true. If we understand the conclusion to be an integration of the premises, and not just an arbitrary statement that comes after them, we can see that it builds on them.

They define it and explain it. It's not just sometimes that they give us a clue to the meaning of the conclusion. They always do, if it is the conclusion.

Also, it's not just that the terms themselves can have different meanings. That's just one way in which a proposition relies on context. Any amount of the context can be different. For instance, the religious person might end up with the same concept of 'murder', referring to the same thing we do in all cases, but the context of his "murder is wrong" is "as long as my religious leaders say it is". Even if he uses the terms in the same way, there's clearly a difference between what he's saying and what we're saying. The referents for his proposition as a whole are different from ours, even though the referents for the concepts may be the same.

Actually, I would say that it's "never use violence". The way you describe it, there's no (or little) overlap. Much more the way I describe it.

It may not be an application. That seems orthogonal to this discussion. All he has to do is phrase it in a general way like "violence is wrong", and suddenly in some very specific contexts, it is true.

I said, "I'm trying to show what context is required in order for it to be true. If a person takes the statement but without the required context for it to be true, it isn't true." You asked,

What do you mean by "required context"? Do you mean the required context of knowledge?

No. I mean the context for the statement to be true. Take the pacifists’ "violence is wrong". There may be contexts in which their statement is true. But if they mean it to apply in all situations, it's false.

Notice that the referents for the words are the same. 'Violence' means what we think it does. 'Wrong' means what we think it does. But in order for the statement to be true (not knowledge...but for it to actually correspond to reality), it must be stated within a specific context in which it's true.

The point is that when someone arrives at a conclusion through false premises, it's entirely likely that they are not meaning the correct context when they state the conclusion. And so their statement actual means something different. And in fact, it's actually false.

I said "If a statement requires a very specific context in order to be true, then when a person lacks that context, the statement isn't true." You followed with

No, the statement is still true.

My first sentence was if a statement requires a very specific context in order to be true. Are you suggesting that context doesn't matter for evaluating the truth of a statement? Or did you miss that part? This seems like such an obvious point. Statements often require context in order to be true. If I say "I want ice cream", of course it doesn't mean I want to be drowned in it. If I say "the sun is shining", I don't mean it's shining everywhere on the plant. I assume this is not controversial?

Later you say "Again, to say that the conclusion depends on the premises is not to say that it includes the premises. As a proposition, the conclusion is still separate from the premises."

I know we're going round and round on this one. Not sure it's worth pursuing much further, but I'll give one more try.

The conclusion is not unrelated to the premises, even as a proposition.

We don't judge the proposition based on whether the premises are true or false. That part is fine. But since the conclusion is an integration of the premises, its not a separate thing.

Good, good. We agree. Now we just need to get you to see that the idea being expressed is actually false and that it's not just coincidentally false but is in fact false because it was arrived at incorrectly. And before you think I'm arguing about knowledge again, I fully realize that its truth is measured by its correspondence with reality, and agree. That defines it as wrong. But doesn't answer why it is that he didn't happen to arrive at a correct conclusion instead. The reason he arrived at a conclusion that doesn't correspond to reality is that he used false premises.

The point you won't acknowledge, even in this clear example of the religious person "opposing murder", is that it was precisely because because his means were wrong that his conclusion was false. It was precisely because he derives his belief from the arbitrary whim of god (or his religious leaders) that his conclusion was different. You put your statement in terms like "Nor is the conclusion necessarily different..." (emphasis mine), and that leaves you able to ignore the entire point.

On top of that, you keep making this assumption:

I don’t think this is correct. If the referents for the concepts are the same, then the referent for the proposition is the same. If the religious person ends up “with the same concept of ‘murder’, referring to the same thing we do in all cases” as well as the same concept of “wrong,” and his conclusion is that “Murder is wrong,” then he holds the same view of the wrongness of murder as we do.

Emphasis mine. Check your premises. You seem to think the concepts "murder" and "wrong" form the entire meaning of the proposition. And this example disproves it.

He may have the same meaning for those two terms, and yet his conclusion is false. He absolutely does not have the same view of wrongness of murder as I do (I'll let you speak for yourself).

That depends on which view you're talking about.

While you insist that his view is the same (despite his inability to label war time or lifeboat scenarios as exceptions.

As long as you ignore the clear differences, I wouldn't expect you to be able to discuss the reasons for the differences. And if you don't do that, you're missing the entire point of what Schwartz is saying.

I'll wrap up my thoughts then. Schwartz makes an important point (even if he may have gone too far) by emphasizing the importance of context to the truth of a statement.

There's a direct connection here between the false method of arriving at the conclusion, and the way in which the conclusion is wrong.

What's the big picture point?

The context by which a person understands a statement is not irrelevant. Without the proper reasons for it, their views are often going to be different. A case we've seen often is the "libertarians" who view rights as an intrinsic value (see Robert Bidinotto's article on this site). While we may appear to agree (we classify the same things as rights, we define it the same, and we all say we should respect them), the difference is night and day in the right contexts. They reject self-defense if it were to inadvertently violate the rights of an innocent person, even if your life depends on the action.

It is precisely because they arrive at the conclusion in a false way that the conclusion itself is false (although seemingly correct).

Another example is Marxists who defend free speech. They may mean something very close to what we do when they're not in charge, but when they gain any power at all, they support violent repression. If we were to ignore their false methods of arriving at the "true conclusion", we could fool ourselves into believing they are allies, long enough to have our throats slit. If we ignored the fact that their "agreement" only exists within very specific contexts, we would be fools.

Or how about those people who think Christianity is a peaceful religion that opposes murder and oppression here in the US? If we ignore how they came to their semi-capitalist beliefs, we might persuade ourselves into allowing them to control the country. Does anyone really think they'd continue to be peaceful when they had the power to enforce their beliefs?

All of these are cases where their conclusions, if taken at face value, may seem okay.

And all are examples where if someone recognizes that they arrived at these conclusions through false means, and that the false means actually change the meaning of the conclusions by changing the context, they would recognize that we really aren't in agreement at all. And all are example's of Schwartz's insight.

To reject that insight means to pretend that we really are in agreement with the intrinsicist libertarians, the marxists free-speechers, and the Christian theocrats. We'd be rejecting the contextual nature of knowledge.

As for the love example, you are assuming as Bill did that the word love changes in the argument. I think that's a straw man, and a really convenient way to dismiss it. I think you can hold to a consistent use of the term love throughout, and it shows the whole point.

The first two propositions [i.e., premises] pose no problem. Each is categorically false. Love is not selfless; it’s selfish. Likewise, selflessness is not good; it is bad. So those two are false. That’s clear. What about the third—what about the conclusion, ‘Love is good’? Isn’t that one true? And the answer is no, it is false. Now how could we say it’s false? Why should it matter that the first two premises are false? The conclusion should still be considered true… Well, it’s false because the context reveals that what the conclusion is referring to in reality is not the same thing that (say) Objectivism would be referring to when it says the same words, “Love is good.” What those words in this syllogism’s conclusion really mean is this: “An emotional attachment which is of no selfish value to either party is good.” …Now is that statement true? No, that is a false statement.

Bill, on the example of the religious person opposing murder, you still imply that he is correct, even though he upholds it as temporarily true and as an intrinsic value.

Let's be very clear here. "Correct" is a bit misleading. I didn't say or imply that he was "correct"; I said that his conclusion was true. Obviously, he's not correct in basing it on religious premises.

Is it any wonder that you can't see why the false premises have, in this case, led directly to the false conclusion? There's no possible way to go further with you on this discussion, Bill. We can't discuss the principle when in every example of it, you ignore the differences in meaning. I think the whole argument hinges on this. For those watching, they'll have to make up their own minds about whether the religious person really is saying the same thing as I am when he says murder is wrong. He'll have to decide if the intrinsic nature of his belief changes the meaning, or whether the temporary nature of it makes it sufficiently different. I say it does.

I think that in practice, those upholding an intrinsic value will act differently than those who uphold it as an objective, relational value. Those who uphold rule-based morality will act different from those who uphold a principle based morality.

And while in some contexts it may have a similar result, that's just superficial. If I'm right, it shows there's something to Schwartz's point.

I think Schwartz is right about this. When Che Guevara says freedom does he not mean something entirely different then when Jefferson says it?

Obviously Che is wrong (false premises) and Jefferson is correct (true premises) they are using the same word yet the meaning is different.