Ludwig V

I agree. I don't even understand what you mean by a circle of deviation. I was indeed deviating in the sense that I was trying to break out of your ci...

No, not like that at all. Your way of putting it is better. But then, I just don't understand what you mean by these comments. Reason and truth are no...

Oh, I agree with you entirely about Truth. But I do think there are truths. (After that, it all gets complicated.) That's true. But I would only make ...

I'm sorry I misunderstood you. I understood that as saying that Augustine might propound Christian/Platonic values in order to support the status quo ...

Yes, that's the idea that the psychologists are pursuing. But the evidence for the existence of such a mental capacity is thin, to say the least. IQ t...

It is true that one can believe something on rational grounds, and be wrong. But if you are wrong, you didn't know it. Knowledge cannot be wrong. If s...

Doesn't "verify" mean something like to demonstrate the truth or accuracy of something, as by the presentation of evidence? In that case, we must be t...

Yes, that's a good way to answer the question. "Any reasonable person..." By definition, nobody could be reasonable unless they preferred being ration...

Well, given the definition that we have of what a symbol is, any knowledge that is discursive would be in human-style language, so it follows that it ...

Well, I would say that an economy that requires people to work for wages that cannot sustain a decent life is broken. But that requirement is so commo...

My impression is that the selection is random, but weighted so that the assembly overall is representative of the population. Men/women. Old/young. Cl...

I'm afraid there's always a ruling class, if only because not everybody is willing to deal with the (often very boring) business of government. Revolu...

So when the goose hisses at me that is a sign (expression) of anger or hostility, which means that I do well to behave cautiously, yet I can only arti...

There's a lot packed in to your comments of the last few days. Thanks. I've had to be selective in what I reply to. I hope I've identified the best pl...

Sorry. Premature posting. Fat thumbs.

You are quite right that that classes are abstract objects and that they range over particulars. But it doesn't follow that all abstract objects are c...

I think this is a much more interesting issue to explore. This is a much more pertinent, and illuminating, issue. I think you are thinking of a distin...

H'm. That's a large and tempting rabbit-hole, but I'm thinking that diving down it would be a distraction. I'm not at all sure that's a helpful way to...

That's not quite what I said. I'm sorry if I was not clear. I left out the conditional "if formal logic is your standard of rationality" and qualified...

Thanks for setting this up. I'm looking forward to it.

Oh, so now we are classifying as rational only what is proof against philosophical scepticism. As to Hume, I suggest that the implication of there bei...

I'll look forward to your reply.

I would go further than that. Let's distinguish the word "danger" and the concept of danger. Creatures that don't speak human-style languages don't ha...

Your first three questions are empirical, not philosophical. My understanding is that there is empirical evidence that there are "windows" when the br...

I don't know the answers to most of those questions. Yes, I do think that being able to justify one's beliefs (and act on them) is an important cognit...

Surely it is possible to remember a sequence of events without visualizing them? Actually, for me, it's not a choice. The sequence of events since I l...

I was taught to drive a car. Hence, I can drive a car. I was taught to think rationally. Hence, I can think rationally. I would be grateful if you wou...

I think what's going on is different approaches to the problem. Neither of us can remember where we put our wallet. You try to prompt your memory. I d...

I follow the same routine, more or less. But I'm just working down a list. Check all my pockets. Then the shopping bags. And so on.

I did say explicitly The ground for my rational thinking or beliefs is the training and education that I got in my youth.

Broad agreement. It occurs to me that it might be helpful to say that a generalization is a quantification over a domain, while an abstraction can be ...

I encountered someone once who told me that he thought in images. Specifically, when he was packing a suitcase, he would lay out everything he was tak...

I didn't mean to imply that they should. Sorry I wasn't clear. OK. Yes, I understand that. But @"Patterner" seems to be suggesting that we can't attri...

So do we create the concept of a threat? Or a llama? We show that we have understood a concept by the way we behave. Our linguistic behaviour is the q...

That was not well put. I should have said what I meant. I was thinking of the question of animal languages, human morality, and even rationality. It s...

Some relatives of mine acquired a dog. Three maiden aunts sharing an apartment/flat. When I first met this dog, it backed off, bared its teeth and gro...

I'm sorry. I wasn't clear enough. I don't blame animal instincts for the super-damage that we have done. There's nothing wrong with them. I thought th...

Sorry. I wasn't clear enough. My explanation is "S is colour-blind", but I thought that ...excluded guessing and parroting. If I look up the time of t...

That's a good story. However, I recently happened to hear a BBC radio science programme that answers questions sent in by listeners (often children). ...

I hope you'll forgive me nit-picking at something that is broadly true. But I think it is important, in order to ensure we avoid various well-known ph...

I've little doubt that is true. Which gives me one more reason for not understanding what it would mean for the universe to be conscious. There isn't ...

So I don't see what your problem is. If my question is "Why can't S tell red from green?", I will want to work out my answer rationally, because that ...

I don't disagree with that. I must have misunderstood you.

I agree with you. It seems to me that there are two concepts of time in play. There is the idea of time as a rhythm or repetition, and our biological ...

I don't dispute that parts of the universe are aware of themselves and of the universe as a whole. But I can't see that it follows that the universe i...

I agree with that. I was thinking, however, that deciding what the physical explanation is would be applying rationality. That's right. But that exter...

Ah, yes. You are quite right. That means that there is something foundational about our perceptions. But I would want to say that it is not necessaril...

I've never thought about emotin in relation to belief, or rather I've always assumed that any emotion was superfluous and basically undesirable. The u...

I have trouble with this. Sincerity, to me, means not affected (pretended), genuine. Emotions can be affected or genuine, sincere or not. So, like hon...

If my data is wrong, despite my assessing it rationally, then my rationality is not in question. It would be if I became better informed and failed to...