Object-level rule: “Stealing is illegal.”
Meta rule: “Laws vary by jurisdiction.”
If the meta claim is itself a law, what jurisdiction has the law containg the meta law? Who enforces it?
Object: "This sentence is grammatically correct."
Meta: "English grammar can change over time."
What grammar textbook has the rule of the meta claim above? Where can you apply that rule in a sentence?
Object: "X is morally wrong."
Meta: "There are no objective moral truths."
The meta claim is a statement about moral systems. It is not a moral prescription like "thou shalt not kill".
If you say "this stop sign is made of metal", you are making a meta claim. If you say "stop" you are giving a directive. It does not follow that if you can obey a directive, you can obey the composition of the directive.
All to say that a meta-claim of morals is not itself a moral claim.
When "meta" claims have implications within the system they are making assertions about, they collapse into that system. The claim that there are no objective moral claims is objective and has moral implications. Therefore it fails as a meta-claim and is rather part of the moral system.
The powerful want us to think that there are no objective moral claims because what that means, in practice, is do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. And, when two wills come into conflict, the stronger simply wins. This is why this self-contradictory position is pushed so hard in our culture.
If an observation about a moral system creates implications for how people act, you may have inspired a new moral assertion, but you haven't 'collapsed' the category.
Knowing that 'the floor is made of wood' has implications for how I'll clean it, but the statement 'this is wood' is still a description or observation, not an instruction or imperative.
Yes. A moral claim is a claim about the morality of our actions. Saying there are no objective moral claims is equivalent to saying "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". Of course, when phrased in that manner, it is at least self-consistent.
I can recommend E.J. Lemmon's Beginning Logic as a first book. It also contains an appendix with a list of important logic books and brief description of them. I'm curious to know whether a more recent, equally well-done, list exists.
It’s very hard to describe without a visual but the gist of it is that the combination of the following 3 packages make it possible dynamically create queries, refine the results to precisely what you want, and then either perform some action on them or just plop them into a buffer for later use. There’s some notion of a type of the result, which means that the actions and results can be richer than just plaintext. Ie: you can imagine a query over a list of commits, where it displays while you’re searching as only the commit shortrev and subject, but where you can viably define a filter on the commit date or commit author. You can then export that list to a temporary buffer, and pressing enter on any given commit will show you the full diff and the full commit message. Orderless means you’re not crafting regexes directly, but just some combination of words in any order or casing.
Another example: grep in the current project for any function matching foo bar baz in any order followed by an open paren, restrict the search to only header files, export to a buffer, run search in replace in that temporary buffer, review the changes, then commit the modification to disk in every matched file with a single keystroke.
My understanding agrees with namaria's. I'm inclined to think that, in the passage you provide, `imperative' means `pertaining to processes' (where processes are those things described by procedures; or, perhaps better put, the meanings of procedures).
Perhaps that's not the question you should ask. You might want to ask "what is your advice based on?" instead. If you do so, you evaluate the conclusion by focusing on the quality of the argument, not features of the argumentator. You would agree, I suppose, that good medical advice could be given by non-doctors, and bad medical advice by doctors.
Related: E.J. Lemmon, in his book Beginning Logic, lists some important logic books and says that Chapter 0 of Church's Introduction to Mathematical logic ``deserves to be read several times by /all/ philosophers''.
