Aristotle thought that the brain's function was to cool the blood. I think we've discovered that this idea was slightly mistaken?
Aristotle also dealt with the problem of future contingents and argued that no descriptive statement about the world can be true until the event it describes occurs. His idea was that if statements were timelessly true, then fatalism held and apparently he was eager to avoid fatalism. So he thought that if today it is true that tomorrow a sea battle will occur, then the sea battle MUST occur, and no one can alter that fact.
I suppose he had a valid argument and perhaps even a superficially sound one, if spelled out specifically in premises and a conclusion or conclusions. The problem is that the argument, if so spelled out, contained hidden premises that were false.
I disagree. I think that the logic itself was not sound, particularly in the sea battle language, specifically because it objects a "must".
This is a modal error and renders the language incorrect; his logic is sound only if you ignore that
one of the premises already invokes a syntax error.
This is one of my reasons for pointing out that Bilby's was also not an example of valid logic.
It is not that the hidden premises are "false" but that they are nonsensical.
This is why I offer that guesses pulled out one's ass are valid philosophical ideas that may be erroneous, whereas beliefs in God and all adjoining results and all things which reduce to it act as invalid philosophy.
This is because even "eternally true" statements are only "eternally true" because they were momentarily true and spoken only if that moment, making their truth conditional on that moment and place and time and
context.
It is not true that there will be a sea battle over there, or over the hill over there, or on top of the mountain. It is not true that there MUST be a sea battle or all of reality and sundy tomorrow everywhere would be sea battles, but that's not what we see. We see sea battles only where and when there
shall be sea battles.
The problem is that when someone uses the word MUST, they MUST establish this for all available contexts to that proclamation, and they only actually manage to establish it for one context, while ignoring all the other valid contexts.
This ends up shaping up as the sort of error in computer science that is so clearly an error that compilers will not even allow you to speak it, no matter what language that you try in. The computer will say "attempted assignment of instance value to static type" or something like that.
This is an excerpt from a reddit thread about the subject I wrote some time ago:
When you ask "could X be Y", if this was a program, you would NOT be asking Is X = Y. A programmer would (or at least SHOULD) slap someone who honestly and persistently says as much or tries to write that into a language!
Instead, "Could X be Y" would be interpreted as "of values under Type(X), does any value = Y" or "does Type Set of X contain Y".
X doesn't have to be Y for "could X contain Y" to be true.
