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Here again, a good way to re-ask the central question. And it relates to your post about relevance. I bolded the phrase above because it's that "somet...

Thanks. Now I'll chew on it.

Must it necessarily lack a theory? Reading your description of it, I was thinking that "you just do" is giving up too easily. Do you know of any philo...

It's the end of the world! :wink: Well, not quite that bad, but I think we have good reason to want to draw back from this conclusion. Before I talk a...

Yes, that's a good summary. Reduction is a whole other mess, agreed. But let me try to say why I don't think my question about the discourse of chemis...

Sure, I see what you're saying. IRL, that's quite likely what would happen, and as you point out, a Marxist or an evolutionary biologist could make th...

Oh for Gödel's sake.

Yes, you've picked a discipline in which the distinction is very hard to draw. To this day we find philosophers challenging a position as "mere psycho...

No, I'm not sure. If you've been following this thread, you'll see that at several points I voiced the desire to find something better, more interesti...

Now you're talking! More cackling, less violence.

Very good. I agree completely.

Well, it depends. If the paper is heavy on philosophical discourse (not usually the case, thank goodness), then yes, running it by a peer-philosopher ...

I'm glad you mentioned aporia. This is another fruitful way to think about what happens when philosophy -- apparently following its natural bent -- is...

I too feel your pain (I'm still reeling from the election), but I can't take your proposal seriously. Or . . . OK, if some legitimate U.S. authority i...

I sort of agree, and also sort of don't. I agree that in practice it's difficult to imagine a serious explication of anything in the physical world th...

Just to pull us back on track a little . . . It was @"Leontiskos", earlier in this thread, who first voiced the question of presuppositions, in this w...

They do, and the issue here is the nature of how they "put into question" those presuppositions. Is it possible to do this without invoking further ph...

I'm not completely sure there is a single right answer -- that is, one and only one way the recursion can occur. Interesting. What must not happen, or...

Yes, though many an honest scientist is probably unaware of doing this until it's pointed out.

This is tremendously helpful. You’ve given this a rigor I wasn’t able to achieve – or actually you’ve revealed it to be several interrelated problems....

I was referring to a situation such as the one involving the neo-Freudian. He attempts to short-circuit philosophical discourse by explaining it in te...

I'm not sure about this. I'll think more about it. Yes, that's an important distinction. I think the problem I'm proposing in the OP is more about ter...

This was new to me, and I like it very much. "Elevator words" is a really useful concept. I agree that it's another look at how philosophical discours...

That's true, but science cannot absorb philosophy into its inquiry, whereas philosophy can set the terms for discussing how science is done. See my ex...

This is a good counterpoint. A philosophical ascent, whether Platonic, Hegelian, or spiritual, ought to be about more than the ability to trump a ques...

This is going to sound paradoxical, but perhaps the starting point of philosophy is in fact the realization that its inquiries cannot be brought to an...

Oh, I didn't realize that's what you meant. I was referring merely to the "gotcha" aspect, where any questioning of philosophy becomes yet more philos...

Yes, that would all be in the spirit of what I'm suggesting. I'm sort of test-driving what I'm calling the Top-Level Thesis about philosophy, and tryi...

I wouldn't assume it. But it might be the case. This OP is definitely in a speculative mode. More an attempt to tease out some possibilities as we con...

Of course not, and neither does anyone else. We are building this particular boat on the ocean. We have, at best, some combination of historical infor...

I think you still haven't taken in the force of my point. Of course it's a view from somewhere, but that isn't what mainly characterizes it. Rather, i...

No, but I am saying that we have every right to criticize computer scientists' language when they begin to talk about other things besides computers a...

I would say no. I believe "subjective" means "a view that someone, some viewing entity has from somewhere," so "to be subjective" means "to be an enti...

Yes, another way of stating the problem I was raising. No matter how much information we end up with about the brain, we still need to know how and wh...

This is ingenious, but I see two problems. First, computer scientists are not authorities at all in the fields of linguistics or philosophy -- indeed,...

Where does this working representation of the world occur? Is it discoverable by science? Which scientific discipline would we expect to discover and ...

Thanks, "useful analogy" seems about right to me too.

I've been following this conversation with interest but I don't yet understand whether the computer-based terminology is meant to be a useful analogy ...

I'm glad it was helpful. One way of "problematizing" the concept of language would be to step back and ask, "What am I/we trying to do by offering the...

Indeed! Which points up that these approaches all have their merits, and none excludes the others.

I'll try. Haslanger argues that there are four main approaches used to answer "What is X?" questions: conceptual, descriptive, ameliorative, and genea...

Or avail yourselves of this excellent paper by Sally Haslanger that discusses different approaches to answering "What is X?" questions. The "what is a...

This is an interesting topic, but I had trouble following you in the ensuing paragraphs. Is it possible for you to offer a fairly short answer to the ...

Thanks, I agree it would be better if we had a good neutral term that wasn't steeped in philosophical history, but I don't know of one either. As long...

I tried to pick the most neutral word possible. Is there a better term for the denizens (another neutral word!) of the "formal realm"? Happy to use it...

Why not? I must be missing something still. I thought such a resemblance was the point of your saying that "there can be resemblance between two state...

Good response. Maybe we need three categories: 1. genuinely contingent physical phenomena; 2. phenomena which we can imagine were otherwise but in fac...

Not to run it into the ground, but here's what you said: Surely that makes visibility "central to resemblance" -- indeed, it sounds like the criterion...

Good, this all makes sense. So why can't we claim that the "non-seeing" resemblance relation is just as central as the seeing one? You'd asked earlier...

The term does invite confusion as it stands. If you read the paper, you see that what Jha et al. mean by "contingent causal laws" is no different from...