cherryorchard

I agree! And yet the output is the same as if it had been doing calculus. That suggests something interesting (though I can't say exactly what...!) Re...

This interesting thread put me in mind of a fun paper I read many years ago, called 'Do Dogs Know Calculus?' A mathematician shows that his dog, when ...

But we don't choose to 'look at axioms' as 'something that can't be proven within a system' – that is what axioms are (it is simply what the word 'axi...

That makes perfect sense – sorry for misunderstanding. But in the case of those sorts of gloves, there are no ‘left’ or ‘right’ gloves, any more than ...

I'm not sure I follow. As Banno says: Gloves look very different depending on which hand they are supposed to fit. If the question is whether 'left' a...

I think this is a good point. There is something more to 'hinges' than just 'the presuppositions we agree to adopt'. And it has to do with whether dis...

What you say here is very clear and succinctly put. It makes sense to me that an adverb functions differently from a noun phrase and raises different ...

Axioms in a formal logic system are also outside all schemes of verification, because they are presupposed and form the basis on which those schemes p...

Thanks for this. But again, this formulation of 'unprovable statements' that are 'necessary for the formal system to operate' makes them sound more li...

I confess I don't have a background in mathematics, but I'm not sure I follow you here. As far as my understanding goes, Godel's incompleteness theore...

I feel we're talking past each other now. As I have said many times, I am not attributing the theory to any particular philosopher. I'm interested in ...

Sorry, I didn't see this second reply. By my reading, what Austin is saying here is that a word need not have an antithesis that is summed up neatly i...

I understand that's your position. I suppose I could reply that Wittgenstein and Austin selected specific words for discussion because they felt that ...

Thank you for the response. That's very kind. At the start of the thread, I felt I was making a bit of a fool of myself. So I'm glad to know I'm not t...

Thanks for the response! Again, I'm sorry for being unclear. I'm talking about statements like 'all x are y' or 'x is always y' – claims about x that ...

This touches on what I tried to articulate earlier in the thread (with my very silly analogy about the coffee machine). Sometimes, universal statement...

Thanks for this reply. I'm interested that you call Gellner's 'paradox' argument a 'slam-dunk'. I confess I can't make sense of what he means at all. ...

Thanks for this reply – again, very helpful. I think this would be toying with language a little too freely. In English at least, we don't 'drive' our...

I sense that your discussion has taken a different line from the rest of the thread, but I feel I should chime in here to say that I don't think Austi...

I have no academic background in philosophy, so I defer to those who know better, but I don't think proponents of the sense-data theory are necessaril...

Thanks for the input. This section in Gellner's book is very brief (only a few pages long) and it's not always quite clear what he means. The example ...

... For instance, is 'we only ever hear sounds' a meaningful statement? We can't imagine any other way of hearing (or at least I can't). But intuitive...

Thanks for this response – it's extremely helpful. I suppose what I'm struggling to understand is how exactly we know which sort of term is a 'genus' ...

Thanks for this. I understand Gellner's critique of ordinary language philosophy is wide-ranging and not limited to identifying a few 'fallacies' (of ...