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Interesting thought. But it depends on who the “we” is here. I think the evidence is overwhelming that scientists have always – until very recently – ...

Shouldn't the first P2 be "normative fact" rather than "non-normative fact"?

We might be on the same page here, pretty much. Like you, I’m not sure we can maintain physical/causal closure, in our current understanding of what t...

Right. You find many of the same problems as I do in Wang, concerning scheme-content dualism. I don’t think the arguments are there – on that front. E...

I think there’s a third possibility why we tend to “default” against strong emergence. This ties to your point that a good model for strong emergence ...

Thanks for the reference to Searle on this. The distinction he makes between internal and external understandings of promising is valid and useful, bu...

I love the Searle example, and how much good philosophical conversation it has provoked. But . . . . it is sleight of hand. The missing "if" premise i...

Interesting. I like the metaphor. Can you expand on this a little bit? It seems really important to get a precise sense of what "the world" would have...

Are you sure Rouse is arguing here for the impossibility of pre-linguistic or pre-theoretical experience? I read him as saying two related but differe...

I'm fine with considering this an "ought" statement in the same way that a moral one is. I also agree that the colloquial, illocutionary nature of the...

Thanks!

I think this is exactly right, and a good reminder not to confuse the two issues. Reductive physicalism can probably be defeated, or at least made imp...

Definitely. I didn't mean that there were no further questions about the nature of water -- or of objectivity. I just picked the chemical composition ...

It's also interesting to see the distinction Aquinas makes between "faith" and "articles of faith." If I'm reading him rightly, he says that objection...

But isn’t this a contradiction? In the first quote, Wang describes conceptual relativism as “confrontations between two languages,” but then you say (...

Thank you for the reference to the Wang paper, which I will read with interest. For now, though, you quote him as saying that conceptual relativism do...

I've read Kuhn but not Rouse. I think Kuhn is wrong in his understanding of the scientific project -- see Donald Davidson, "On the Very Idea of a Conc...

Because this won’t work for almost all of our uses of “objective”. It’s objectively true, I presume, that water is composed of H2O. Do we want to desc...

T. M. Scanlon is good on this: "Accepting science as a way of understanding the natural world entails rejecting claims about this world that are incom...

I’ve been following this discussion with some bemusement. Would one of you be willing to put forward a target definition of “free will” -- one that ma...

I don’t know if you’ve read Walker Percy. He makes an interesting distinction between “knowledge” and “news.” Knowledge would be the sort of thing tha...

Maybe a "Personal Spiritual Experiences" category could be added to the Forum. I don't want to derail this interesting thread by going on about my own...

Have I ever! Don't get me started . . . :starstruck: I don't mean to make this just about me, but the (non-LSD) experience I had, some 35 years ago no...

I think the "dessicated social religion" part is very true, provided you're talking about mainstream U.S. Christian denominations -- perhaps not the b...

As I read him, James isn’t saying that the “simples” -- of whatever level of simplicity -- are objects of perception at all. Certainly it’s a question...

I agree with Austin that using veridical vs. illusory as way into the question isn’t promising. The insight from James that I quoted earlier seems muc...

This might help, from William James via Owen Flanagan: "the idea that our simple perceptions are in fact generated by the binding of even simpler unit...

I dunno. This doesn’t strike me as one of Austin’s better points. Suppose I said, “I see a collection of 7 to the 112th power molecules that looks lik...

That would be one way of seeing it, but actually I was saying the opposite. “Pure sensation” or “qualia” or whatever term you prefer is what we call t...

Well put. The problem, then, is not whether there’s only one way vs. at least one way, but whether the (one or many) ways can be constructed without s...

Agreed, though I think qualia are problematic for Austin in one important respect: In the passage you just discussed, Austin sounds as if he believes ...

I don't quite get your question. Could you say more? Do you mean that it would be more accurate to say "roughly correct" or "very good approximation o...

Thank you!

I don't think Russell believed he was using "real" in a special or technical sense; he probably thought his use was obvious. Turns out, it requires a ...

Many thanks. I don't see Russell as arguing for the impossibility of direct perception, but maybe Ayer does; I'll read him and find out. Russell's "re...

Thanks, and that'll teach me to review the material before posting! I'd forgotten that Ayer is his primary antagonist -- a worthy opponent back then, ...

Glad to see this thread starting up. Austin is always worth rereading. This talk of “not directly perceiving objects” makes me wonder, not for the fir...

Kant wasn't a Christian apologist but he was a Christian, and not just in name. His ethical philosophy is impossible to understand without including h...

I don’t want to overlook this important quotation. Nagel is telling us that, as @"Wayfarer" says, the epistemological buck stops with what Nagel calls...

That’s a great description of the kind of metaphysics based on transcendental deduction, of which Kant was the master. I think it’s possible to invert...

You’re right, and I may have placed the emphasis misleadingly on the idea of an “activity” in general. Walking and eating are unproblematic examples o...

Right, I don’t at all mean to diminish the significance of identifying and, if possible, resolving verbal disputes in philosophy. Ordinary language ph...

Well, but only fairly good. Put it this way: Before time T, I'm not thinking about a cup. At time T, and for a certain time after, I am thinking about...

This means, I take it, that “thought of a cup,” understood as some sort of object or newly created ontological entity, doesn’t exist. Very well. What ...

This response nicely sets up what for me is a key meta-philosophical problem. Traditional metaphysics, in my understanding, isn’t willing to concede t...

Interesting answer, thanks. Though I can't help thinking that something so clearly absurd (in this telling of the story) would have been noticed long ...

This is a little off topic, but I’m always curious about positions like this. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that your position is true, i.e., K...

I like simple too. "Simplistic," the word I used, means something different. What I meant, more or less, was that Kant's impressive philosophical syst...

Not to butt into someone else's argument but . . . aren't we getting a little over-simplistic here? @"Banno", surely Kant didn't "deny that things exi...

Attention is one of the few things I enjoy paying!