[quote]In Exile wrote...
My account is descriptive, not normative. I am not saying there ought to be some metaphysical divide. To the contrary - there ought not.[/quote]
I agree. I hereby call for all cutscenes to conform to the immutable rules of the setting (whatever those happen to be).
[quote]But insofar as whether it exists right now, the answer has to be yes.[/quote]
If we accept that both the gameplay and the cutscenes represent the in-game reality accurately, I would agree.
[quote]This is a problem you need to address, since it exists.[/quote]
I think I just did. I think your conclusion requires an unnecessary assumption.
Incidentally, you may have just solved (unsatisfactorily, but a solution nonetheless) my Mass Effect problem.
[quote]Except that we know how a the known set of injuries behave - we know that they entail no incapacitation or limitation of function. [/quote]
How is a reduction in maximum hit points, or dexterity, or defense not a "limitation of function"?
[quote]More importantly, we can investigate these rules as we can any law of nature. Insofar as you grant that science can discover laws of nature, i.e. that you are willing to grant a justified scientific epistemology in our world, then we can "know" things about the precise set of rules in DA:O.[/quote]
But you know I don't do that. I'm a strong Popperian.
There's no truth in science.
[quote]But we can test all of this empirically. We do have an exhaustive list of injuries - 13 in total. We can test this empirically, by using AoE FF techniques to knock out our own party members, and see how they behave injured and when injuries cease to stack. After 13, no more injuries are possible independent of the number of knock-outs.
We know that these injuries do not interact, and do not cause any functional limitation. They do not impair speech or cause laboured speech, they do not impair movement speed and they do not require assistance from other characters to move.
These are all empirical facts. If you want to reject knowledge from empirical investigation as justified, then you've just jumped off the sceptical deep end.[/quote]
This is the position I've held all along. You've mentioned it before. I maintain that the only possible knowledge is conditional knowledge; you can only know the truth of things relative to the truth of other things.
[quote]Put another way: there is no categorical imperative to reject this possibility on logical grounds. But there is evidence consistent with the claim being false and not with the claim being true.[/quote]
And if I needed to reach a positive conclusion, that would matter.
But I don't. One almost never needs to reach a positive conclusion.
[quote]Since meeting the sort of deductive stanard you ask is impossible for any empirical question, the standard is meaningless in evaluation whether or not a claim is in fact true, because the conclusion for all possible claims would be that they could be false. Since the model reaches the same conclusion for anything, it has no power to demarcate.[/quote]
It demarcates perfectly well between consistent and inconsistent sets of propositions.
If you want it to describe the world around you abd believe you're speaking the truth, first you'd need to defeat the brain-in-a-vat problem. And clearly you haven't done that.
[quote]A useful standard, on the other hand, where we weight only the preponderance of evidence, tell us clearly that the injury mechanic can't account for this. [/quote]
What do you mean by useful? For a system of reasoning, I would equate "useful" with "truth-preserving". Preserving truth is the entire purpose of reasoning.
[quote]It also ignores the possibility that deduction is not a justified form of inference. As I mentioned before, there is no non-deductive reason you can ever offer to justify deduction. Thus it is perfectly possible that any conclusion reached by valid deductive reasoning is false.[/quote]
That's not even news. Of course a valid deductive argument can lead to a false conclusion. But judging the argument based on the truth of its conclusion completely misses the point of deduction.
It's the validity itself that matters, not the truth.
[quote]Put another way, if we are going to enter into the sceptical loop of ''unless you have shown it to be impossible it can be possible,'' then your argument has is not justified since there is no justified form of reasoning by this standard. If you believe that holding a non-justified belief is irrational, your belief right now is irrational.[/quote]
I dispute that uncertainty is ever a belief. And if that's not what you think I'm saying, then I think you're misinterpreting the word "possible" which would deem equivalent to "has not been shown to be impossible". I'm not actualll making a claim about whether something can happen or can be true. I'm making a claim about whether its justified to believe that something can't be true (and I'm saying it is not).
This is the right time for an excluded middle.
[quote] No, that is not the case at all. My reasoning is the opposite, in fact. I would argue that the characters must eat even if the rules do not say anything (or tell us the contrary) because the characters speak about eating as an aspect of their experience in terms analogous to ours.[/quote]
Do they? I don't remember any specific references to eating in DAo - that's why I chose teh example.
Assuming there are no references to eating anywhere in DAO, what then is your opinion regarding the existence of eating in the game's setting? Do you hold that there is no eating?
[quote]The final arbiter of the natural laws of the world and the experience of them in-game, to me, is the report of these rules by the characters themselves. [/quote]
The final arbiter to me is the documentation of those rules.
I see any divergence between the game's behaviour and the game's documentation is a design error.
[quote]No, Sylvius, I don't. I justify the exclusion of outcomes you never do. You want to allow for any possibility that has not been demonstrated to be false, but you have never taken this belief to its logical conclusion.[/quote]
I assure you, I have.
I possess no propositional knowledge. And neither do you.
[quote]You have no justified form of reasoning open to you. If you believe that holding any non-justified belief as true is irrational, then your claim regarding possibility is contradictory.[/quote]
I addressed this above. It's a problem only of definition.
[quote]You seem always hold my reasoning to your standard of evidence, but that is absurd; I don't believe the same sort of things are valid evidence as you do.[/quote]
Yes, I know. You believe other things, unjustifiably, and those beliefs limit your gameplay. I've explained this before.
I'm trying to help you. I'm trying to show you that your beliefs are unjustified (and probably unjustifiable), thus freeing you from them.
[quote]But this begs the question. I am asking you what justifes combat rules as the rules of the setting. You cannot throw back the claim that they are testable rules of the setting, because it still presupposes that they are rules of the setting. You have to give me some reason to believe I should consider them meaningful in the first place.[/quote]
Documentation. Some rules of the setting (primarily relating to combat and inventory) are laid out for you (the player) in the game's documentation. This is the only knowledge you have about the setting's rules.
[quote]It may be that the evidence is purely anectodal outside of combat, and it may be (and is, I would argue) that testable evidence is superior. But that does not mean it is the case that the rules of combat apply outside of combat.[/quote]
True, but when trying to derive rules to describe the setting, I would prefer to do so in a scientific way. To posit that there exists a second separate set of rules governing a second separate metaphysical state requires fairly extraordinary evidence - else you violate Occam's Razor.
[quote]Here is a better question: how can you justify the change in difficultly, since it is a recognizable and testable rule in combat? If you believe that the rules of combat are the laws of nature, difficutly switching indicates that the laws of nature change at the behest of (at least) the PC, if not the party as a whole.[/quote]
The change in difficult level happens outside the game. This is equivalent to saving or reloading the game - these events are not noticeable to the characters within the setting, since they do not occur within the setting.
The PC never changes the diffuculty setting. The player changes the diffuclty setting.
[quote]This is an empirically testable claim. It affects physical features of the world (like resistances). The player can alter it. The player can alter it mid-game and so physically alter the laws of nature.[/quote]
The player can choose to adjust the laws of nature. How are these changes perceived by teh characters in the game, you ask? Why not ask them. You seem to think their testimony is valuable.
And I don't think they claim to notice the changes at all. Perhaps that means the changes are imperceptible to them. Perhaps that means the changes didn't actually occur within their universe, but instead changing the difficulty simply shifts the player's perception to an entirely different universe wherein exactly the same things are happening but under different rules.
And you shouldn't have needed my counter-examples to see that your assertion was unjustified.
[quote]Which says nothing about whether or not they govern anything that is not combat.[/quote]
Entirely true.
But I'm still forced to ask, why do you believe they don't?
[quote]You are not denying a metaphysical distinction by making this claim; if anything, you affirm it, by pointing out the only environment where the rules can be seen or tested is combat.[/quote]
"If anything". That's a very important phrase. Perhaps you should consider the possibility that the antecedent in a conditional can be false.
I agree with your conditional. If anything, I affirm it. But I don't affirm it, therefore not anything. Modus tollens.
[quote]Only if we pressupose there is no distinction.[/quote]
No. Only if we fail to presuppose that there is a distinction. And of course we do, because there's no justification for such a presupposition.
[quote]But that is what is at issue. We need some accepted standard of evidence prior to even engaging in this sort of debate. And I have put forward my standard: in any environment, the only way to investigate the rules of the world is the behaviour of characters it in, as their behaviour is constrained by the rules of nature. We can rule in favour of an outcome if the preponderance of evidence weighs toward that decision as opposed to its logical opposite.
There is no reason to believe the rules of combat do not apply only to combat.[/quote]
Nor is there any reason to believe that the rules of combat do apply only to combat.
There's no reason to believe anything at all. It's possible there cannot be.
[quote]Simply put, because any of them died during the battle. If they understood the rules of their world, they could power game.[/quote]
What evidence do we have that they don't? Or that they necessarily would given the option?
At no point during DAO was I ever outnumbered to the extent that Duncan and Cailan were in that cutscene, so I don't have any evidence that such an encounter is surviveable. I also don't know how long they fought before falling, so perhaps they exhausted their supply of healing potions.
[quote]We know from Awakening we can reorder statistics.[/quote]
I've not played Awakening (I still object to patch 1.03), so I didn't know that. But that only tells us what is possible in Awakening, not Origins. Why are you assuming they are governed by the same rules when you're unwilling to make that assumption with regard to combat and non-combat?
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