"We cannot disassemble a book in any way..."

I wrote:

Not that it matters very much,

Michael Adams replied:

No indeed.

At least not unless you want to return to the discussion of what
constitutes "facts".

We seem to be at cross-purposes. My point was that you started off by
saying:

a good principle to try and adopt perhaps, is to try and avoid
getting into disagreements, even over seeming trivialities, with
people acting on principles or meta-principles.

and then appeared to contradict that by saying:

There's no principle needed. .

It all gets a bit too reminiscent of the Monty Python sketch, but if you
make a principle of not getting into disagreements with people who are
acting on principle, then I must not be acting on principle, otherwise you
wouldn't be disagreeing with me. And - even more convoluted - if you make a
principle of not getting into disagreements with people who are acting on
principle then it follows that you also make a principle of only getting
into disagreements with people who are not acting on principle, in which
case you are yourself acting on principle in disagreeing with me, and the
principled response to that (according to you) is not to disagree with you.

Which would bring the argument to an end. But you now say it is *not* a
principle to avoid getting into disagreements with people acting on
principles and if it is true, as you claim, that

people truly acting on principle aren't prepared to argue anyway

then, since we both *are*$B!!(Bprepared to argue, clearly neither of us is
acting on principle.

When I say it doesn't matter very much, I am simply being pragmatic. Whether
we are acting on principle or not, and whether - if one or other or both of
us *are* acting on principle - we should forebear, on principle, to argue
with each other or not, the fact remains that we *are* arguing (or
disagreeing or discussing), and will doubtless carry on until one or other
of us tires of it.

The validity of an argument it totally independent of whether
anyone happens to believe it or not.

Agreed.

Furthermore most arguments whether valid or not are usually produced by
people who believe them to be true. Often wrongly.

Agreed.

The point is that whether the author happens to believe an argument to
be true or not is totally irrelevant.

I disagree. If the author believes it *not* to be true, and has good
evidence for that, but is merely arguing in order not to lose face, or to
protect some vested interest, then it may matter a great deal.

in any case what Kant really believed is again immaterial.
His work either stands or falls on its merits.

Sounds good, but suppose Kant (having explored the issues more thoroughly
than anyone else) perceived a fundamental flaw in his reasoning and, instead
of admitting it, fudged it and hoped no one would notice. And suppose no one
*did* notice. Kant's work would then stand, not on its *actual* merits, but
on *supposed* merits, until and unless someone came along with the insight
to spot the flaw.

Or suppose Kant got it absolutely right, but no one had the insight to see
this, and the world went on, in a muddled and forsaken way, bypassing Kant's
work, not because it lacked merit, but because humanity lacked the insight
to *perceive* its merit.

Or suppose Kant had said, "I have presented a critique of pure reason, but I
do not myself believe it to be reasonable and therefore refrain from
believing what I have written". To say that this would make no difference is
all very well, perhaps, in abstract philosophical terms, but here in the
real world he'd have blown his credibility to bits.

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com

Michael Adams wrote

you totally missed the point.

I think you did. You don't seem to consider the fact that arguing is in
itself a form of action, so if one is arguing on principle one is acting on
principle. To claim otherwise is to claim that there is no such thing as
principled argument, which you appear to do when you say:

People who are acting on principle simply aren't prepared
to argue. That might well be one defining quality of
someone acting on principle in fact. Their unwillingness
to argue.

The corollary would be that anyone who is willing to argue is - by
definition - not acting on principle.

one might just as well say that people go around making a
point of not murdering people or not stealing. So that unless
you're prepared to admit that you personally make a point of
consciously going around not murdering people, then I
think you have no choice but to admit the absurdity of your
position.

Call me old-fashioned, but I always make it a matter of principle not to
murder anyone, at least not before breakfast.

One reason for publishing anything, as with publishing a
scientific paper is to give the wider community the opportunity
to shoot the thing to bits. There are probably countless
examples of people publishing things they admit they can't
quite believe themselves, but which are clearly suggested by
the argument or evidence. What fatally damages the author's
credibility is when the arguments or experiments can't withstand
even cursory examination. Not whether they profess to
believe in them or not

Yes, I'll go along with that. But what I am getting at is not what people
profess, but the *objective-correlative* of what they profess.

Let me try to put it another way. You argue that Kant's work stands or falls
on its merits. But what determines whether it does or does not have merit?
Kant's central thesis is that there is an objective morality, and everything
else he says pretty much pivots round that. So if there is *not* an
objective morality, Kant's thesis pretty much falls to bits.

Can we agree that the merit of Kant's work depends on whether there is or is
not an objective morality (and, to be a little more exacting, that its
functioning conforms at least roughly with the principles he proposed)?
Presumably not, because if you agreed with me on that, it would just be a
short hop to agreeing that the merits of calling snow white depend on
whether snow *is* white, and the merits of an explorer's map of a new-found
land depend on whether it really does depict the contours of an actual
country, and the merits of calling people desperate or shocked depend on
whether there actually are any desperate or shocked people around to whom
these epithets apply. And, somehow, I can't see you coming round that
easily!

To be quite honest

Now, don't start that! How honest is "quite" honest? Is it more or less
honest than you normally are? And, even if you assure me that your "quite"
is an absolutive, 100% "quite", your assurance - even if you yourself
believe it to be true - is irrelevant, since your argument will stand or
fall on its own merits, not on how honest you profess yourself to be.

And its final merit will depend on the objective-correlative, i.e., whether
you really *are* being honest.

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com

Michael, I think we've reached the point where we're more or less going
round in circles. We're now basically recovering ground we covered before,
and nothing new is likely to come up. It comes down to principles. You've
stated yours, I've stated mine, even Bob Finnan (though I would have thought
that anyone not interested in these kinds of issues would have ceased to
follow this thread long ago) has stated his. You are operating on somewhat
different principles, or making different basic assumptions, from me.
Clearly neither of us is prepared to cede ground, so we haven't really got
anywhere much left to go.

If issues of seeming and being, ontology and Usenet or whatever arise again
I will be able to provide the other party with a link to this thread and
carry on with other things. Perhaps, apart from that, not all that much has
been achieved and the issues - like the chess pieces you compared them to -
can go back into their boxes and be shelved; as the poet said, it's all "a
checkerboard of nights and days":

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and sage, and hear great argument
About it and about, but evermore
Went out by that same door wherein I went
(Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)

Perhaps, though, even if no converts have been made, we have at least
crystallised the issues. I still don't know what to do about the banter. I
was fooling around a couple of times in my last posting and you responded as
if I was serious both times, but I guess that's just going to have to be one
of the things we agree to differ about.

Cheers!

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com

Michael Adams wrote:

IMO the day anyone allows themselves to be dictated to, by
the Bob Finnons of this world, is a worse day for everyone!

Oh, no, I wouldn't give a fig. I don't have anything against him personally,
but he has made many postings, in his day, which bear no relationship to the
supposed business of this newsgroup, and for which he can only crave
indulgence.

No, I'm burning the midnight oil as it is, in an effort to radically change
and update my website, and I'm horrified when I realise the amount of time
I've spent mulling philosophical issues instead of getting on with the task
at hand! If I don't get a move on, the next academic term will be upon me,
and I still won't have got the "new look" site up and running.

At which point, I have to decide what matters most - getting you to
recognise when I'm bantering and/or persuade you that objective morality
must either be as real as snow or else it is nothing at all, or getting the
website updated and completing various DIY jobs around the home before the
pressures of work take over and I will have very little time for any of
these things. Not to mention the fact - as I said - that I think I've got to
the point where I'm just finding different ways to say the same things. I
really don't have very much to add.

All of which, you realise, is not so much by way of explaining myself as of
presenting a case which is self-consistent and will stand on its own merits!

I've enjoyed the bouncing back and forth of philosophical ideas - there
aren't too many people I can do that with. I'll be happy to have another
bout sometime. We may not put the world to rights, but - at least for my
taste - it beats reading Hardy Boys books!

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com

I wrote:

I'm burning the midnight oil as it is, in an effort to
radically change and update my website

Michael Adams replied:

I do so hope your using strictly percentage sizes so as to
acommodate different screen resolutions.

God, Michael, I wish I even knew what you meant! Here's a link to one of the
pages in progress (nearly finished; I just have to add the "buy it now"
icons). Does it pass your tests?

http://rarebooksinjapan.com/indexa.html

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com

I assume you're working in 800 x 600.

Try resetting your monitor resolution to 1024x 768
and see what you think of the layout then.

Actually, my monitor resolution turns out to be 1024x768, and it looks OK.
when I set it to anything else it looks strange (too big for the screen).

Having a look at the HTML the tables are set in pixel widths
rather than screen percentages, which will affect alignment etc
at different resolutions.

Yes, that's right. I'm using a programme called Macromedia Contribute, and
that's the way it's set up.

Ideally tables should be set as a percentage of the available
screen area if you want to keep the same layout at all resolutions.

I don't think I can do that with the current software.

Also when viewing at 800 X 600 your page size is already sightly
too large - it must goes to around 820 as I have to use the
horizontal scrollbar.

Hmm. If I have the "Favourites" menu on the left-hand side of my IE browser
the edge of my page goes off the screen on the right, but it doesn't
actually matter (on my screen) because that's just the margin anyway;
there's no writing or anything else there. If I close the "Favourites" menu
the whole page appears on the screen.

I notice you're using a variable text size ( It can be changed in the
IE view menu )

Apparently, yes. I went and tried it, and it's as you describe. I don't
really know what to do about it, though! I can try editing the html in the
way you suggest, but I find it very fiddly working with html, and prefer
something like the Macromedia software because (for all its faults) it can
be used quite easily by non-technically-minded people (like me).

One thing I can do without any problem is change the centre alignment to
left alignment. Macromedia can toggle that OK, and if it's going to look
better on some sytems that way then it's worth it.

Thanks for the tips. Now to get moving and finish the damned thing!

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com

Michael Admas wrote:

Are you sure about this resolution ? If you have a 17 inch monitor
or smaller, in 1024 X 768 a lot of the text is very small and hard to
read unless you have Windows set up specially.

Well, on the device manager the monitor properties say it's Super VGA 1024 X
768, and if i go into control panel and change it to anything else it just
looks weird.

have you checked the appearance when you
remove the borders from your tables ?

I wish I could, but the software doesn't allow me to have tables without
borders.

At the moment I've got most of my text in Times New Roman size 18 bold. I
can use the html code you gave me to reduce the size of the text, but if it
comes across as too big I might as well just do it on the wysiwyg doohdah.

Thanks for the tips...Now, to work!

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com

In article ,
(John Yamamoto-Wilson) wrote:

Michael Admas wrote:
have you checked the appearance when you
remove the borders from your tables ?

I wish I could, but the software doesn't allow me to have tables without
borders.

Can you open the files you are producing in Notepad? If so, just
add "border=0" (without the quote marks) inside each TABLE tag.