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by bonoboTP 2017 days ago
I find it very often that these types of "numbered premises and consequences as natural language statements" analyses become "not even wrong", moot and missing the point.

The actual meat of the problem gets stashed away in what you exactly mean with your natural language sentences and "suitcase words". You may pronounce that Statement A is in contradiction to Statement B but it my be only true in some sense and the whole thing collapses because you made a hidden implicit assumption that turns out to ruin the whole nice house of cards.

Its easy to come up with those logical games, see proofs of God's existence.

If you can make those statements precise enough you get mathematics. If you cannot, you're better off doing empirical work and leaving the possibility open that you're wrong in some fundamental way. You my proclaim that either A or B is true and in 20 years it turns out that "hmm, things don't really work like that, neither A nor B is really true or it depends on how we look at it but generally this just wasn't a productive way to approach the issue in hindsight".

Its a bit like presenting a measurement result with too many decimal places, giving the impression of high precision when it's unwarranted. In the same way the principled structure of philosophical musings makes them look more definite than they actually are.